Pretty Good Year
by Cesario21
Summary: My first novel length fic. In the last days of the Second Voldemort War, Severus Snape is at last fighting openly on the side of his true allegiance. Feature SnapeLuna, LupinHermione, TonksMoody, and an insane Neville Longbottom.
1. chapter one

**Pretty Good Year**   
by Branwyn   
  
_But the end of all things is at hand: be ye therefore sober, and watch unto prayer._  
  
**Part One**  
  


1.  
  
The building is garrisoned with a third of all the Aurors in Britain, but Snape still cannot bring himself to turn his back on a door.   
  
So he stands facing it, leaning a shoulder against the cool stone wall of McGonagall's chambers. Unlike most of his colleagues, McGonagall doesn't mind talking to the back of his head. It saves her the bother of keeping herself busy as they speak; she hasn't looked anyone in the eye since Molly Weasley was killed two weeks ago.  
  
"They've started slaughtering our owls," she says, with the careful non-inflection of a woman experienced in delivering unpleasant news.  
  
She cannot see his face so he does not trouble to raise an eyebrow. "Only ours?"  
  
"All the ones bearing Untraceable charms. Taking no chances, it seems."  
  
His hand curls at his side. Not tight enough for a fist. He is reminding himself of the strength he can call upon when necessary. And of the miracle that is the human body, functioning as it is meant to. "I assume we cannot reach them by Floo."  
  
"They—I should say, Leopold—refused to join the Ottery St. Catchpole enclave, which is the only unmonitored fire in that end of the network that we have access to. Of course, if they were with the enclave in the first place we wouldn't need to have this conversation." He hears the splash of tea against the side of a teacup. Her hands are unsteady.  
  
They have reason to be.  
  
She is waiting for him to speak, but he has nothing to say. He is not in the habit of thinking aloud.  
  
She misinterprets his silence. "We owe him a debt."  
  
"I do not contest it."  
  
She pauses. Then, taking his words as correction, she tries another way. "You've been a spy for almost twenty years, Severus. There are worse ways to end that sort of career." Her voice becomes hopeful. Almost tender. "And one way or the other, we are very near the end."  
  
The argument is a poor one, and he wishes to say so, but other words fill his mouth. He jerks, almost to the point of turning around, and arrests himself by looking over his shoulder, past McGonagall, who is sitting in a chair across from the fire. Slumping.  
  
In the thirty years Snape has known her, he has never before seen her shoulders touch the back of a chair.  
  
Snape trusts McGonagall, and not merely to keep his secrets. He was afforded that much courtesy by Harry Potter, and it doesn't especially warm him. Rather, he trusts McGonagall to do him justice. She understands compromise and discretion, and she is not offended by subtlety.   
  
"It is not that I am reluctant," he says finally. "I hesitate because....I am not reluctant."   
  
He has never in his life made an admission of this depth to anyone other than Dumbledore. The sight of her, weakening, disturbs him.  
  
She nods. "We are all tiring."  
  
The clock in the Great Tower is striking half past eleven. Time to go. Preparations to make, and prayers to say.  
  
He says as much to McGonagall; bids her good night and is bidden luck in return. He stops just inside the door, before turning and facing her for the first time.  
  
"Tell the Headmaster I will return as soon as I'm able. And that I won't end it unless I have to."  
  
She nods as though she believes him, and he leaves.  
  



	2. chapter two

2.br  
  
br  
  
br  
  
He cannot Disapparate from Hogsmeade. The town has fallen, and he would be observed. brbr  
  
Those who would see him are allies to his present guise, but if he leaves the school freely they will know that he does not keep his movements secret from Dumbledore. He navigates treachery with the expert step of one long at practice, but it would be deadly to assume he is beyond mistakes.brbr  
  
The hippogriff is tethered in its usual place. He Disillusions them both, the animal first because she panics if she cannot see him when he mounts her. He dislikes flying as much as he dislikes any task that confronts him with his limitations, but he is accustomed to sacrificing more than comfort for this work.brbr  
  
He flies to York, sending the hippogriff back to the castle; from this point he is free to Apparate to his destination. Getting back to the castle will be harder without the beast but he cannot leave her tethered here—wizards are sparse in the area and there is always the chance that he won't be able return for her in time. Or at all.brbr  
  
"You're late, Severus." Antonin Dolohov appears by his side the moment he materializes on the grassy hill. They are just near enough to see the lights of the house below, shining bravely into the unknown.brbr  
  
"I was delayed," he replies, curtly. "As you know, my situation is delicate."brbr  
  
Dolohov lays a hand on his shoulder, a gesture meant to be brotherly. "The time of deception and guise is almost over. Soon you will be able to show the world your true face."brbr  
  
For twenty years, Snape has pursued Occlumency with a near religious fervor. The truest measure of his skill is the fact that, after twenty years of spying, he is still alive. Nonetheless he is uncomfortably mindful that Dolohov's grandfather had been a Seer, and he pulls his thoughts farther into his mind, the gesture of a man turning his cloak against the rain.brbr  
  
"In my haste," he says, addressing Dolohov and whoever else might be near—he thought he had seen the swirl of Mulciber's robes from the corner of his eye—"I was obliged to leave without the Cerements."brbr  
  
"You shall wear Rabastan's," Dolohov says, gesturing to a distant figure. "We celebrate tonight in memory of him."brbr  
  
Snape holds out his hand for the long cloak, and the white mask. He sheds his own cloak before donning Rabastan's, an unnecessary, superstitious act. There are no werewolves in their number, and it is unreasonable to imagine that one of them might smell Rabastan Lestrange's murderer on his clothing, even if he had been drinking tea with her an hour ago. Still, his pulse calms by a fraction after he is masked and indistinguishable from the nine who surround him.brbr  
  
They walk eight abreast toward the little house, which glows purple under combined Anti-Disapparation Jinxes and Shielding Charms. Dolohov, and Rodolphus Lestrange, mount brooms and soar over the heads of the others, aiming for the slanted roof. One of them—Rodolphus, he is sure—laughs brilliantly, and for a moment Snape is seventeen again, on his first raid, exulting in the terror and the sensation of being, for once in his life, precisely where he belongs.brbr  
  
He watches as Dolohov and Lestrange touch down on the roof briefly, then push off again. Immediately, the Dark Mark bursts into green flame in the sky above the house, and Rodolphus' laughter becomes part of a chorus.brbr  
  
"Open up in the name of the Dark Lord!" Mulciber shouts in a gleeful sing-song, pounding on the door.brbr  
  
They peel off one by one, taking up positions around the house until one man stands at each corner and two stand at points north and south. No more than six may perform this task, lifting the immensely strong wards and enchantments that guard the homes of even the least talented witches and wizards. Crabbe, Goyle, and Mulciber stand outside the circle, waiting to rush through the doors as soon as the enchantments fall. Snape, contrary to custom, stands with them. They trade glances among themselves, but neither Crabbe nor Goyle would dare question him, and Mulciber wouldn't care if he happened to notice, which is unlikely.brbr  
  
Snape can feel the protective enchantments resisting the counterspell, as though shrieking in angry human voices, until they dissolve with a noise like someone screaming from very far away.brbr  
  
"Steady on, lads," Mulciber says, staring hungrily at the door of the house, his wand at the ready. "Steady...and...now!"brbr  
  
The door explodes under an arc of red light, and Mulciber is through it so quickly that he has to fight his way through a shower of splinters. Crabbe and Goyle follow him closely and Snape trails them at a slight distance. Those who formed the circle will not be fit to join them for several minutes yet, and it is the job of those who precede them into the house to make the way secure.brbr  
  
The moment before Snape steps over the threshold, the room on the other side fills with yellow light, and Snape throws his arm up to shield his eyes. A man cries out, and another curses. brbr  
  
"Little blighter," says Mulciber from the floor as Snape enters to find the remnants of what had moments ago been a drawing room. His schoolboy's mane of dark hair has escaped its style enchantment, and now hangs raggedly in his eyes. "Hit me from out of nowhere with a Spine-Softening Hex. Missed though." He is cradling his arm, limp and useless, to his chest, and glaring, as though in an inter-House corridor duel, at a motionless figure sprawled across a settee where Crabbe and Goyle are standing guard, and looking proud of themselves.brbr  
  
Leopold Lovegood is some ten years older than Snape, but at the moment he looks fifty. He has the long, ascetic face of a scholar, his bushy grey eyebrows the only hint of his wilder eccentricities. This is the man who published the first public declaration ever issued by the Order of the Phoenix, and continued to reprint it twice a month for six months after Fudge outlawed the Order and deployed all the Aurors who hadn't joined Kingsley Shacklebolt in the General Strike to arrest every member they could track down. Lovegood's face is frozen in an inappropriate expression of gravity and determination; he was obviously immobilized seconds after Mulciber came through the door, probably immediately after hexing him. Blood trickles from the corners of his mouth and nose, and tears are forming in his eyes. They are panicked, horrible in the slack expressionlessness of his face.brbr  
  
When Snape replies, it is in tones of mildest interest. "Why don't I bring the daughter down to join us?" He looks around the room, as if addressing all of them. For the briefest moment, he meets Lovegood's eyes, and into his own he summons all the apology and all the promise he can muster.brbr  
  
Mulciber begins to pull himself to his feet, smiling until he winces and clutches his arm again. "Fine idea. Goyle, go with him. Crabbe, take the blood-traitor outside."brbr  
  
Snape glances at Goyle, who lurches from his position and crosses the room to the staircase. Snape sweeps after him, forbidding himself to look back.brbr  
  
"How old's the girl?" Goyle asks in a low voice as they approach the landing.brbr  
  
"Eighteen, I believe. She left school at the end of last term."brbr  
  
Through the shadows he sees Goyle grin. Snape's own mouth twists, as though in sympathy to the implication, even as his fingers tighten around the stem of his wand.brbr  
  
There are three rooms in the upper portion of the house. The one with the door standing wide is a water closet, which Goyle pokes his head into then turns his back on. The second appears to be Lovegood's bedroom, and Goyle's perusal again reveals it to be empty.brbr  
  
Snape moves deliberately to the door of the third room before Goyle can beat him to it. "Alohomora."brbr  
  
He throws the door open and nearly enters before reminding himself that Luna Lovegood is no longer a child, but a fully qualified witch, and that even a child can be dangerous when cornered. He mutters the shield charm, then raises a light and steps into the small, cheerfully furnished room.brbr  
  
It too is empty, however.brbr  
  
An instant later, Goyle groans, stiffens, and falls to the floor beside Snape with a thud.brbr  
  
Snape whirls to see Luna Lovegood standing in the doorway of the W.C., her face graver, emptier, than he remembers it. An invisibility cloak is trailing from her shoulders, and her wand is pointed at Snape's throat.brbr  
  
He pulls the mask from his face, and keeps his own wand at the level.brbr  
  
"Hello, Professor," she says, as calmly as though she were greeting him inside a classroom. The cloak slides to the floor in a heap of richly hued fabric, revealing soft blue robes cinched at the waist by a belt made of what appeared to be hippogriff feathers.brbr  
  
"Good evening, Miss Lovegood." He releases a breath he had not realized he was holding. "That was an admirable hex. I did not know you were in possession of an invisibility cloak."brbr  
  
"It's Harry's."brbr  
  
He stares, and before he can stop himself by considering the illogic of the thing, he is glancing around for the boy, though he knows perfectly well that Harry Potter is hundreds of miles from Ottery St. Catchpole.brbr  
  
Snape lowers his wand. They have less than a minute before Mulciber will begin to grow suspicious, and he cannot afford to stun her.brbr  
  
"Can you Apparate, Miss Lovegood?"brbr  
  
If she finds the question an odd one, she does not show it. "Yes."brbr  
  
"That is good. You need to come away with me."brbr  
  
She shakes her head. "I can't."brbr  
  
He casts around for something to convince her, and all he can summon are lies. "Your father is there. He is waiting for us to join him."brbr  
  
"No he's not."brbr  
  
"If you stay here, you will die." Or worse, he thinks to himself, without glancing at Goyle.brbr  
  
There is a noise at the bottom of the stair: Mulciber is craning his neck to see the landing, and the people standing there. "Snape," he calls, "what are you doing? Haven't you found her yet?"brbr  
  
"Listen to me," he says, ignoring the younger man. "I can get you to safety, but you must do as I tell you. There is no time for debate."brbr  
  
"Snape?"brbr  
  
"I've found something rather strange, Mulciber," Snape calls over his shoulder. "Why don't you come have a look?" He turns rapidly back to Luna, and seizes her arm. She winces, and he relaxes his grip without releasing her. "Once I've stupefied him," he says in a much lower voice, "there will be no turning back. I will also be in danger, and I will need your help as much as you will need mine. You must trust me."brbr  
  
Mulciber is halfway up the stair. Snape mutters the curse while still turning to face him, and only by reaching out and grabbing the other man's shirtfront with both hands does he prevent his inert body from rolling down the stairs again and alerting Crabbe.brbr  
  
Seeing this, the girl lowers her wand. Her eyes dart past Mulciber to the light coming from the bottom of the stairs. "My father is down there."brbr  
  
"Listen to me!" Snape lowers Mulciber to the ground, not gently, but slowly enough to prevent noise, and as his back straightens he grabs her arm again. "Your father is beyond our aid. I promised him I would get you to safety. We have no choice. Legilimens!"brbr  
  
One of the greatest practical benefits of mastering Occlumency is that few witches and wizards bother to study so much as its rudiments. He enters the girl's mind with as much ease as he would draw a panel of lace curtain away from a window. brbr  
  
The greatest practical drawback to Occlumency is the temptation to become lost in another person's internal world. Snape himself has little experience with this phenomenon, as the sort of wizards whose minds he is accustomed to entering are dark, fearful, cluttered places. But Luna Lovegood's mind is different: light fills his vision in blocks of saturated color, like a child's patchwork quilt. He feels a strange mingling of amusement and sorrow, emotions bleeding together as though inside her mind there are no rooms, only a great mixing bowl of thought and feeling.brbr  
  
With effort he forces himself past sensation and into thought, just long enough to send her the information she will need—a clear picture of an interior room in 12 Grimmauld Place, and the appearance of the building's exterior. Under the terms of the Fidelius Charm he would be unable to speak or write this information to her, but neither the spoken nor the written word would enable her to Apparate—for this, she needs a visual reference, and Legilimancy allows Snape to show her what he cannot tell her.brbr  
  
He breaks the spell when he is certain the picture is firmly in her mind, and opens his eyes to find her looking him, dazed and accusing.brbr  
  
"You must Apparate to the location I have just shown you, Miss Lovegood, the very moment we are out of range of the Anti-Disapparation Jinx cloaking your house. When I give the word, you must Apparate immediately. Do you understand?"brbr  
  
There is no time to wait for a verbal confirmation. He pulls the white mask over his face again, seizes the edge of the girl's invisibility cloak, and drapes it around her shoulders, pulling at the hood until her head is covered. She disappears from sight, and only the nearness of her quick breath assures him of her proximity.brbr  
  
"Follow me," he whispers, and descends the first two stairs. He does not move to the third until he is certain he has heard her footsteps behind him.brbr  
  
The shattered drawing room is empty, which means that Crabbe has followed Mulciber's directions and taken the elder Lovegood outside, where the Six will be sufficiently recovered to begin taking their amusement. The Anti-Disapparation Jinx is only binding inside the walls of the house itself. Snape had intended to simply step through the front door, where the invisible girl at his side would be unnoticed, and Apparate before the others suspect him of anything. If they walk through that door, however, the girl will not be able to avoid seeing her father, and might well expend herself on some act of anguished heroics—Potter has a bad habit of transmitting that tendency to his friends.brbr  
  
"Is there a back door?" he says, turning to where he believes she is standing.brbr  
  
"In the kitchen," she replies, from a spot a foot to the left of where had been looking.brbr  
  
Just as he begins to suggest that she temporarily lower the hood of the invisibility cloak, he feels a hand tugging at the edge of his sleeve, leading him steadily across the littered drawing room carpet to a door in the opposite wall. Something inside him shudders as, without speaking to each other, they both begin to run, first through the kitchen, then through the door, into the woods beyond the house, and when he cries, "Now!" there is a great, spreading warmth in his chest, and when he opens his eyes in 12 Grimmauld Place it is still there.brbr  
  
Bobbing in the air beside him is Luna Lovegood's disembodied head.brbr  
  
brbr  
  
No one has lived in the house for over a year, and it shows.brbr  
  
After Black's death four years ago, the property was inherited jointly by Harry Potter and Remus Lupin, neither of whom cared for the prospect of living there. The Order, on their sufferance, continued to use it for a meeting place and a safe house, but after Fudge declared the Order to be in rebellion against the Ministry of Magic, travel was restricted, and those who did pass through the house had no time to kill doxies or sweep up puffskein hair.brbr  
  
Snape shrugs himself out from under the murdered Lestrange's cloak and spreads it across the dusty upholstery of a nearby sofa. The featureless white mask he tears from his face with a conscious effort not to think about the significance of either the object or the act. He tosses it aside without looking to see where it lands, and with his other hand he reaches forward, slowly, until his fingertips brush the silk of Luna Lovegood's invisibility cloak.brbr  
  
She does not look up when his hand comes to rest on her shoulder, nor does she seem to notice as he steers her to the sofa, where she sits down as soon as the edge of the seat hits the back of her knees. He can count on less than five fingers the number of times he has touched a student with his bare hands, but she makes it easy to avoid dwelling on the thought. Her eyes stare into nothing, and her hands lie slack upon her lap.brbr  
  
Over the years, he has made a study of students' faces; noticing the minute flare of a Weasley twin's nostril has often meant the difference between dodging and falling victim to a Dungbomb assault. He has driven students to (and over) the verge of tears often enough to know the signs: the rigidity of the muscles around the mouth, the eyebrows hunkering low over the eyes. The girl will clearly begin to sob at any moment. Her borrowed invisibility cloak is sliding from her shoulders, revealing, in patches, the blue robes beneath. She looks like a picture that has been partially erased.brbr  
  
He has work to do. He must contact Dumbledore and McGonagall, and he must begin planning their route to safety. (Protected as they are in this house, Snape does not consider being trapped in a place incapable of sustaining life for long periods of time "safe.") It would be easier if she would simply cry and get it over with; he could excuse himself to make tea, heavily dosed with sedative, and leave her to leak salt into the cup while he arranged the vital second half of their journey. But watching her in this state gives him the same feeling of anxious anticipation he might have while watching a delicate potion brew; he would not willingly leave either one alone.brbr  
  
He speaks, eventually, not knowing what else to do, and finds his voice surprisingly steady. "Your father....died bravely. While fighting." brbr  
  
It is the kindest lie he can think of. He knows perfectly well that Leopold Lovegood is almost certainly still alive, and will remain so for many hours. His ultimate fate will depend on what mood the other members of the raiding party are in after they discover Snape's treachery. If they start to hunt for him, they might kill Lovegood immediately to get him out of the way. If, on the other hand, they decide to make him pay for his daughter's escape, they may never kill him at all.brbr  
  
"You can't ever go back to them now," she replies.brbr  
  
He is reminded, with a twinge of irritation, her propensity for speaking in non-sequiturs. "Excuse me?"brbr  
  
"You said 'after I stupefy him, there's no turning back.' That's what you meant, isn't it? They'll know you've betrayed them now. You can't be a spy anymore."brbr  
  
At a time when other students of his acquaintance would be preoccupied with their own troubles, she is asking about his. He is disarmed, and also, strangely, gratified, so he answers honestly—more honestly than he had been able to answer McGonagall. brbr  
  
"I joined them tonight knowing that this would be the end of it."brbr  
  
"Why did you come at all?"brbr  
  
"I came to—save you. Both of you. I failed your father." Saying it aloud is an unpleasant relief.brbr  
  
"Thank you for not failing me," she says, so quietly and matter-of-factly that Snape stares at her a long moment, in doubt of her meaning more than her sincerity. "I think I would like a cup of tea, if you don't mind."brbr  
  
He jerks, startled, then turns and leaves the room, chiding himself for what he is certain must have looked like extreme awkwardness. It is his habitual reaction to surprise.brbr  
  
More recent activity has taken place in the kitchen than in any other part of the house, so tea is not difficult to put together, nor is the valerian root he wanted for a sedative hard to come by. He is on the point of bringing the tray into the sitting room when it occurs to him that Ravenclaws do not lack subtlety, and that her request for tea may well have been a polite way of asking him to leave her alone for a bit.brbr  
  
He takes another five minutes, investigating the cupboards and mentally calculating the amount of time two people might survive here if they were stranded. When he returns to the sitting room he notices immediately that she has transfigured the color of her dress. It is white now. The invisibility cloak lies over the arm of the sofa, and her wand is on the seat beside her.brbr  
  
His mask, disregarded since he first threw it to the floor, is in her hands, and she is studying it with what appears to be deep concentration.brbr  
  
He has too much self control to snatch it from her hands, and the anger he would have directed at any other person her age feels inappropriate here. Not knowing what else to do, he sits and pours the tea, concealing a sharp intake of break in the teapot's rising steam. He pauses after adding the valerian to her cup, then sets it aside, choosing not to mix it with his own. Relaxation also feels inappropriate to the moment. brbr  
  
She takes her tea without thanking him, her eyes never rising higher than his hand or her own. After the first sip she places the cup and saucer on the table, and speaks, looking at the mask.brbr  
  
"You've spied for Professor Dumbledore since the first war."brbr  
  
He arches an eyebrow at this. Clearly, Potter does not guard his secrets with as much vigilance as he had supposed. But the girl gives no sign that she is aware of having revealed forbidden knowledge. She simply takes his silence as confirmation, and asks another question.brbr  
  
"What did you do all the other times the Death Eaters attacked people? You can't have rescued them all."brbr  
  
Snape stares at her for a moment, his teeth automatically clenching, his rational internal voice chiding him for feeling, however momentarily, betrayed. He forces himself to look down into his tea, instead of at the top of her head.brbr  
  
He had forgotten, briefly, what she is. Her strange silence, her unexpected composure, the danger they had escaped together bare minutes ago—all had combined to alter his perception of her. She no longer seemed to be the smirking creature he had taught for five years, the average student who cultivated a number of annoying affectations, a hanger-on of Harry Potter and his circle. Time seemed to have changed her into a perceptive and brave young woman, possessed of preternatural serenity.brbr  
  
He had forgotten, briefly, that to him she will always be a student. That to her he is the skulking potions-master, an object of alternate fear and ridicule.brbr  
  
What were his failures to her? What interest could she take in his nightmares, save to turn her knowledge into a weapon, as they all did?brbr  
  
"No," he says at last, in tones he calculated for the specific purpose of sending first year Hufflepuffs into hysterics. "I didn't rescue them all. I have watched many people die, Miss Lovegood."brbr  
  
"But not my father."brbr  
  
"Not your father," he says without thinking, then looks up at her again, appalled, to find that she is looking right at him.brbr  
  
They stare at each other for a long moment, before Snape smiles tightly, and speaks over the voice in his head calling him a hundred names, each unpleasant, each true. "Well, Miss Lovegood. Are you satisfied?"brbr  
  
"Yes," she says, without averting her eyes.brbr  
  
That gaze is more than he is willing to make himself bear just now. He rises smoothly from his seat, placing his tea cup on the tray and removing his wand. A low gesture, calculated to frighten first year Slytherins. Luna does not seem to notice it.brbr  
  
"I have preparations to make on both our behalfs," he tells her. "You may call if you have need of me."brbr  
  
He waits a moment to see if she will respond, but at his words she looks away and seems instantly to forget his presence. He is halfway to the door when her voice stops him.brbr  
  
"You won't have to anymore."brbr  
  
He turns. "I beg your pardon?"brbr  
  
She is holding the white Death Eater's mask out to him at arm's length. "You won't need to watch people die anymore, will you?"brbr  
  
He snatches the mask from her fingers, and leaves without answering her.brbr  
  
He closes the door behind him without shutting it tight; there is a thin seam of light between the door and the door-jamb, through which he can see the girl in the room beyond.brbr  
  
Her sobs are, like her manner of speech, deep and strangely quiet. From this angle, he can only see her in profile. Her hands are pressed tightly to her mouth, but her face is not distorted by the rictus of unadulterated agony.brbr  
  
Snape watches her, his fingers clenched around the pliable white fabric of the mask. He wonders to himself if he ever had the potential to be the kind of man who could have placed a hand on her back and pulled her to his chest, resting his chin on the top of her head, covering her face before she could see that he too was weeping, noiselessly, passionately, as a prisoner newly released who is not yet convinced of his freedom.brbr 


	3. chapter three

3.brbr  
  
That the solution to their problem proves ridiculously simple does not irritate Snape so much as the fact that it is Luna who discovers it.brbr  
  
After leaving her with the tea, and giving the portrait of Phineas Nigellus a message for Dumbledore, he had put his mind to the challenge of getting away from Grimmauld Place and back to Hogwarts unseen. Having neither hippogriffs nor brooms at their disposal, the difficulty had seemed a substantial one.brbr  
  
He was debating the merits of Apparating to the edge of the Forbidden Forest then Disillusioning them both to escape the notice of the centaurs (and wondering whether there was a charm that would prevent other predators from smelling or otherwise sensing their presence) when he happened to glance in at the girl in the sitting room.brbr  
  
He had paused, blinked, then pushed the door open, whereupon he took to staring. brbr  
  
"Miss Lovegood. I understand that the stress of the last few hours has been considerable for you, but do you really find that enchanting household objects will lessen your grief?"brbr  
  
She had smiled, which was startling enough in itself, and with a flick of her wand the large Oriental rug had floated to where he stood. The table bearing their tea things was perfectly balanced on top, and when the rug settled to the floor at his feet, the table came to rest without so much as rattling the china. brbr  
  
"I think this will do."brbr  
  
"I beg your pardon?"brbr  
  
"The rug will carry us to Hogwarts. We'll want to make quite a few stops of course, just to bolster the charms, but we should be all right."brbr  
  
His left eyebrow shot dramatically to his hairline. "You wish us to make the journey to Scotland on a flying carpet?"brbr  
  
"It will be quite cold of course, but no more so than a broom, although we haven't got any of those, have we, or the house wouldn't be such a mess. Daddy and I were practicing on the door mat at home. Daddy knew a Gorgon in Greece he thought might help us fight the Death Eaters, but the Portkeys and the Floo network are monitored these days and Daddy wasn't much good on a broom. But I'm quite good with Charms, you know," she had added, off-handedly.brbr  
  
He had turned his back on her then, but an hour later he had conceded the lack of acceptable alternatives. The carpet had provided a surprisingly stable ride, though it was slower than a broomstick, and lacked any controls for steering; the best they had managed was tugging on tassels to turn left or right. The tension of being perpetually in danger of sliding off the surface kept them alert, and though Snape had insisted on stopping every hour to reinforce the charms, they were over the castle grounds by dawn.brbr  
  
Once inside the Great Hall he had taken leave of her with an abruptness matching his discomfort with the intimacy that had been required between them. "I trust you can find your way to Ravenclaw Tower from here. The password will be the same as when you left at the end of last term."brbr  
  
He had turned in the opposite direction and made his way to Dumbledore's office without another word of guidance or explanation.brbr  
  
Certain members of the Order, himself among them, had been called to meet the Headmaster at dawn.brbr  
  
brbr  
  
He knows he hasn't missed the meeting—he's never that lucky, and it's not yet sunrise anyway—but he is still disconcerted by the small crowd of people leaking from Dumbledore's office. Another meeting must have preceded his, testament to the fact that no one seems to sleep anymore.brbr  
  
Hestia Jones and Emmeline Vance nod to him as they pass. Arthur Weasley, his normally plump and ruddy face gone thin and shadowed under the eyes, does not. His two oldest sons walk like guards on either side of him. brbr  
  
He hears muffled voices from behind the door of the office, one of which can only belong to Minerva McGonagall. He knocks, and enters without waiting for a response, certain that he is expected.brbr  
  
McGonagall is facing Dumbledore, who is seated at his desk. She seems either not to notice or not to care that Snape has entered. Dumbledore nods to him slightly, then meets McGonagall's eyes again, waiting.brbr  
  
"Molly Weasley died two weeks ago," she says. "Why did you not acknowledge it when you told everyone about Elphias Doge and Leopold Lovegood? Surely we should have observed a moment of silence for her as well." brbr  
  
"I would certainly have done so, Minerva, were there not several excellent reasons to do otherwise. If you must know, Bill and Charlie Weasley asked me not to mention it. They believed the reminder would make their father's task more difficult."brbr  
  
"I see." Her back is rigid and her tone somewhat higher than normal. "And what were the others?"brbr  
  
"The other reasons? I considered their request reason enough, but one might also say that everyone knew of Molly's death already, whereas Leopold and Elphias were lost to us so recently that few within the Order had heard." Though his tone was anything but strident to begin with, it gentles perceptibly as he continues to gaze up at her. "Does it matter to you so very much?"brbr  
  
"You know it does."brbr  
  
Snape begins to inch backward toward the door. He has developed an infallible instinct for escaping incipient emotional scenes, and one is clearly developing now. Dumbledore, however, catches his eye, and before he returns his gaze to McGonagall Snape has detected the unmistakable glimmer of command: he is to stay put.brbr  
  
"You must not blame yourself, Minerva. You are not responsible for what happened to her." brbr  
  
She makes a sound which in a less dignified person would be called a snort, but Dumbledore does not acknowledge it. "You exercised your best judgment. It is irrational to believe you could have prevented the consequences."brbr  
  
"Rabastan Lestrange was one of my students," she says, thickly. "The responsibility goes deeper than you know."brbr  
  
Snape flinches, as though from the threat of a physical blow.brbr  
  
"Do you hold me responsible for Voldemort's actions, because I once chanced to teach him Transfiguration?"brbr  
  
"Of course not," she retorts. "But you did not sit on information that might have saved Lily and James Potter from their deaths because of some vague idea of....of expediency...." She bursts into tears and turns away from Dumbledore and Snape both.brbr  
  
Snape is on the edge of firmly, insistently, excusing himself at this point, when footsteps become audible in the hall outside.brbr  
  
He turns to see Remus Lupin entering the office, his pose so casual that Snape is certain he must know, at least in part, what he is interrupting. He feels a surge of simultaneous relief and annoyance, which is more and more frequently his reaction whenever Lupin walks into a room.brbr  
  
Minerva, turning aside, discreetly dries her eyes with the sleeve of her robe.brbr  
  
"Good morning, Headmaster," Lupin says, a little too loudly. "Severus, Minerva. Sorry if we're late."brbr  
  
He has taken no more than two steps into the small room before he is followed by Alastor Moody, Nymphadora Tonks, Bill Weasley, Aurelia Vector, Filius Flitwick, Honoria Sprout, and—his eyes narrow, more from habit than reason of any present annoyance—Hermione Granger.brbr  
  
"Ah," Dumbledore says, his voice cheerful. "Good, you're all here. We can begin."brbr  
  
Snape takes his seat in the corner of the room farthest from Dumbledore's desk. The others follow suit, though all the seats nearest Snape remain empty.brbr  
  
"Any news from the general meeting, Headmaster?" Sprout mirrors Dumbledore's lighthearted tone, putting her feet up on a long sofa Snape doesn't remember being there during previous visits to the office.brbr  
  
"Nothing substantial, I'm afraid, Honoria. Arthur is having some difficulties resettling the families of our Muggle-born students in protected areas. Molly was responsible for most of the finer details of that operation, and Arthur naturally finds it painful to fill the gaps her death has created."brbr  
  
Sprout opens her mouth, but closes it without saying anything, and from the corner of his eye Snape sees McGonagall lower herself slowly into a seat near Flitwick.brbr  
  
"Severus." Snape lifts his head at the sound of his name, immediately anticipating an unpleasant request. "I was wondering if I might ask you to relate your business of this evening. Only Minerva and I have heard the outcome, and I am sure we are all anxious for the details."brbr  
  
From his corner, he can see everyone turning in their seats to face him. Lupin, sitting nearest to him, is wearing an expression of interest and mild concern, that same politic mixture of restraint and emotion which never seems to betray him, no matter how deep the hollows under his eyes have become. Hermione Granger, beside Lupin, frowns delicately at Snape over the back of her chair. She and Lupin are sitting quite close to each other; when she turns her head, strands of her hair fall over his shoulder.  
  
Snape quells the urge to clear his throat. He speaks softly, and keeps his seat.brbr  
  
"Late last night I received notice that a party of Death Eaters intended to visit the home of Leopold and Luna Lovegood in Ottery St. Catchpole, Sussex." brbr  
  
Granger gasps, and other such noises are heard across the room. Filius Flitwick, head of Ravenclaw House, murmurs to himself and shakes his head. brbr  
  
"The Lovegoods chose to live apart from a protective enclave, so there was no way of warning them ahead of time. I made arrangements to join the party, in hopes of conducting the Lovegoods to some place of safety during the confusion, but I was...too late to save Leopold."brbr  
  
He breathes deeply in hopes of loosening the restriction in his chest. He despises this, and does not understand why Dumbledore is requiring him to confess himself before a crowd. Leopold Lovegood is not the first man he has ever abandoned to his death, but these failures have always belonged to the world outside the castle. The rules are different there. Sacrifices are necessary.brbr  
  
He continues. "Miss Lovegood and I Apparated to Grimmauld Place, and made our way back to the school from there." He is in no mood to tell them about the flying carpet. "She is unharmed."brbr  
  
"Where is she now?" Granger's eyes are wide. "You said she's in the school?"brbr  
  
Snape has a brief mental flash of Luna Lovegood, quiet and pale in her long white dress, standing just inside the castle doors. Where he had washed his hands of her, and gladly. "She is in Ravenclaw Tower. She seemed to prefer solitude, and I thought she needed to sleep."brbr  
  
"But how did you get away, with all those Death Eaters nearby? They—they must know you've betrayed them by now, they'll know you've been a spy." Granger's questions come with a rapidity and insistence that cause him to drive his fingernails into the palm of his hand.brbr  
  
"You are correct, Miss Granger," he replies, keeping most of the impatience from his voice. "I was obliged to hex Marius Mulciber in order to clear the way for our escape. I do not believe I will be able to make my excuses this time. My behavior can only seal the doubt of me which has, I believe, been growing in the Dark Lord's mind of late." brbr  
  
Quiet whispers answer this statement, but no one seems to know how to react until Dumbledore speaks.brbr  
  
"You have done much for us, Severus. If the price of Miss Lovegood's life was the forfeiture of your position in Voldemort's ranks, I for one will not say the price was too high."brbr  
  
Another murmur across the room, this time of assent. The tension of the moment fades, and business continues.brbr  
  
But Snape, staring at the Headmaster from the back of the room, is not listening to Bill Weasley when Dumbledore asks him to report on his conversation with a cult of hedge-witches in Brittany who are sympathetic to their struggle. He does not listen as Aurelia Vector or Alastor Moody stand and speak a moment later of their intelligence contacts from within the Ministry.brbr  
  
He is too busy wondering what can possibly make Luna Lovegood any less acceptable a sacrifice than the dozens of others he has turned his back on for the sake of his mask.brbr  
  
He does not force his attention back to the world outside himself again until a sudden and complete stillness fills the room, signaling that Dumbledore has risen to speak. Snape has no choice but to shelve his anger and listen, then, because this is the reason he consents to be part of these meetings. brbr  
  
This is the reason the Order stays on its feet: Dumbledore's perpetual air of assurance has charmed them all into believing, in some superstitious corner of their souls, that as long as he is with them, they will never be pitted against enemies beyond their strength to overcome.brbr  
  
Individually they may stand or fall. But no one—Snape included—believes Dumbledore can be defeated.brbr  
  
"I have received new intelligence," he begins, "that will shape the course of our final resistance in this struggle."brbr  
  
As dramatic opening lines go, it is quite effective. The ambient level of tension in the room increases instantly to nearly palpable levels. brbr  
  
Dumbledore continues, his tone reminiscent of what his Transfiguration lectures must once have been. Alastor Moody could tell them.brbr  
  
"There are no records now, and no wizards living, who have memory of a time when we as a society have not placed our trust in those creatures we call dementors. I fear that our relationship with them is as old as the human inclination to be blinded by fear. That is to say, timeless." brbr  
  
He pauses to look at them with darkening eyes. "It is well known that dementors are sustained by feeding on the best and purest emotions and impulses of their victims. What may be less well known to you is that this self-same process, drawn to its logical conclusion, results in the creation of more of their kind. Dementors are only able to reproduce themselves by feeding deeply of numerous victims. New dementors attain shape and substance by piecing themselves together from the dregs of human souls."brbr  
  
Snape looks to the row of seats before him at Lupin, who appears calm. Beside him, however, Hermione Granger is staring in open-mouthed horror, and the faces of those around her are similarly grim. Evidently Snape is not the only person receiving an education in this matter. Lupin alone seems unsurprised; but then, Dark creatures are his speciality. Snape, on the other hand, has spent most of his life determinedly avoiding the very thought of dementors.brbr  
  
Dumbledore continues, apparently unconcerned by the effect of his words upon his audience. "It was due to their natural sympathy with Voldemort that the dementors abandoned the guard of Azkaban three years ago. They remain loyal to him still, for he provides them with unprecedented scope for their hunger. Soon—very soon, I believe—he will deploy them in legions, and they will cover the length and breadth of wizarding Britain. He will drain witches and wizards everywhere of the will or ability to resist him, using, when necessary, the Imperius curse, to which the dementors will have made the populace weak."brbr  
  
Dumbledore eyes remain grave over a small smile. "You see the genius of it. The widespread presence of dementors will engender such despair that hundreds of new dementors will arise. Their coming will, in turn, create still more despair. Eventually the magical community will simply collapse upon itself, allowing Voldemort to assume the reins of power with minimal resistance. I imagine, in fact, that many people will welcome him when he presents himself, for once he has employed his cruelest tactics to gain power, he will be able to rule with hints of mercy.brbr  
  
"Our present advantage in this matter lies in the fact that we have channels of information to which he is not yet wise. Our ability to resist him will depend on our continued ability to surprise him."brbr  
  
"But how?" Hermione Granger speaks hoarsely into the near minute of dead silence that follows. "How can we resist them? We can all produce a satisfactory Patronus, but that won't be nearly enough..."brbr  
  
Granger is wrong. Snape has never in his life produced a Patronus of sufficient strength to drive off a pogrebin or a lethifold, let alone a dementor. But he does not contradict her.brbr  
  
"You are quite right, Miss Granger. The combined strength of every Patronus in the Order will not be sufficient to combat them."brbr  
  
"How then?"brbr  
  
Dumbledore walks slowly back to his seat behind the desk, and when he speaks again, a hint of cheer has been restored to his voice. "Remus, if you would be so kind?"brbr  
  
Snape arches an eyebrow at Lupin, as he stands and plunges his hands into the sagging pockets of his shabby jumper. Granger is looking up at him in surprise.brbr  
  
Lupin clears his throat and gives a small smile. brbr  
  
"Let me tell you about a room in the Department of Mysteries, which is always kept locked."brbr  
  
brbr  
  
An hour later, Snape's head is spinning, and not merely with exhaustion. He has not taken his eyes from Lupin once in the last forty minutes.brbr  
  
He is the first to leave the office, but he stops when he hears his name called from behind him.brbr  
  
"Professor Snape." Filius Flitwick is motioning to him from the door of Dumbledore's office. He pauses for a moment, irritation flickering: he does not wish to walk back through the small surge of people behind him. But he does, excusing himself as he steps in between Alastor Moody and Nymphadora Tonks.brbr  
  
"Severus, you said Miss Lovegood was in Ravenclaw Tower?" Sprout hails him as he passes. He nods, and she walks off in that direction.brbr  
  
Flitwick's small, weathered face is carefully non-expressive. He retreats from the doorway, so that Snape has no choice but to follow him inside the office, where Dumbledore is perched on the corner of his desk and watching them both. brbr  
  
He begins to scent an ambush.brbr  
  
"Professor Snape, might I inquire after your arm?" Flitwick says, tipping the door shut behind them.brbr  
  
Snape stares at him a moment in honest bewilderment. "My arm, Flitwick?"brbr  
  
"Mmm-hmm." Flitwick gives a small nod, then taps the back of his own arm at a spot some four inches up from the top of his wrist.brbr  
  
Snape's hand moves automatically to the same spot beneath his sleeve, where the Dark Mark lies, cool and dormant. "Ah. I see. Thus far, Flitwick, I am untroubled."brbr  
  
"Thus far," Flitwick repeats, nodding. "I realize it is an imposition, but may I...?" he gestures.brbr  
  
Snape has exposed this portion of his arm precisely three times in the twenty years that have passed since taking the Mark. But Dumbledore catches his eye, nodding minutely, and Snape begins to understand Flitwick's interest. Slowly, he draws the sleeve of his robes to the elbow, revealing the thin, sinewy arm and the black scoring of the tattoo beneath.brbr  
  
"Hmmph." Flitwick contemplates the Mark without touching it or his arm. He removes his wand, and mutters a spell under his breath that Snape does not quite hear. The air immediately over the Mark seems to waver and grow thick for a moment.brbr  
  
"When the Mark, er, activates, what does it feel like?"brbr  
  
Snape allows his sleeve to fall back into place. "Burning. In the immediate vicinity. Left...untended...it intensifies."brbr  
  
"That is an extremely potent variation on the Protean Charm. I have never seen one like it. Does you think—that is...." Flitwick clears his throat. "I am afraid that the Dark Lord's ability to cause you suffering may be...prodigious."brbr  
  
"That thought has also crossed my mind." Snape glances from Flitwick to Dumbledore. "I don't imagine there is any remedy. Save the final one." Death, Snape does not say aloud, because there are two deaths to whom it might refer. Three.brbr  
  
Flitwick nods. "That is possible, but I wouldn't want to give up all hope just yet. Give me some time, Severus, and I will see what I can do. There may be ways of ameliorating its effects, if not blocking them entirely." He pats Snape on the arm, well above the place where the Mark lies. "Give me time."brbr  
  
"I...thank you, Filius." Flitwick nods again to Snape, then to Dumbledore, and leaves.brbr  
  
Snape wishes to follow him, but he too looks to the Headmaster. Not quite for permission, but for an acknowledgment of intent. It is his habit from of old.brbr  
  
"You seem dissatisfied."brbr  
  
So many potential objects of dissatisfaction have arisen in the last several hours that Snape does not know how to respond, except to feel that Dumbledore's comment is an inadequate response to all of them. "How so?"brbr  
  
"You were present when I spoke to Minerva earlier, so I will not repeat my observations on holding oneself responsible for matters past control."brbr  
  
Snape is unable to restrain a small laugh. "Do not concern yourself, Dumbledore. I hold myself no more than...realistically accountable for Leopold Lovegood's death. Mulciber hexed him, not I."brbr  
  
"I see." And he waits—clearly expecting Snape to offer an alternative explanation for whatever agitation he imagines he has perceived.brbr  
  
There is much that Snape would have been inclined to say to him an hour ago. The passage of time, however, and intervening revelations of the greatest magnitude, have conspired to make his complaints seem...petty. brbr  
  
But Dumbledore is waiting, and he does not lie to Dumbledore. So he voices them anyway.brbr  
  
"I only wonder...if, twenty years ago, you had told me that the price of your forgiveness would be the life of one slightly ridiculous eighteen year old girl, I would have acted any differently."brbr  
  
And there it is, squirming in the open between them, a pathetic thing. But he cannot take it back.brbr  
  
Dumbledore's eyes widen slightly, which makes Snape more uncomfortable than the childishness of his words. He does not like to believe Dumbledore can be surprised.brbr  
  
"Severus," Dumbledore says, lightly, gently, killingly. "My dear boy. Have you truly believed, all this time, that you had to earn my forgiveness? You had that the moment you came to me, a broken child, twenty years ago."brbr  
  
Snape freezes, his eyes fixed on the opposite wall. "What, then," he says, controlling his voice to prevent the creeping hoarseness in his throat from sounding in his speech. "What have I been working for, if not for you to forgive me?"brbr  
  
"For you, I believe, to forgive yourself."brbr   
  
Snape closes his eyes. A moment later there is a knock on the door, and he gathers himself together, before the intruder can see him or speak. brbr  
  
"Headmaster, is—ah. Sorry to interrupt. I can't find Luna Lovegood, Severus. Are you quite certain she was in Ravenclaw Tower?"brbr  
  
Snape turns around to face Honoria Sprout, no trembling in his hands or voice. "To the best of my knowledge."brbr  
  
"Well, we need to find her. Help us take a look around?"brbr  
  
"Of course," he says, striding from Dumbledore's office without another word or glance in the Headmaster's direction.brbr 


	4. chapter four

4.brbr  
  
Ravenclaw Tower, is, after a month and a half of emptiness, cold and dark and as lonely, in its own way, as Grimmauld Place had been. brbr  
  
Luna sits for a moment on her old bed, which no longer feels like anything that ever belonged to her, then goes to the small in-House library, where she sits in a blue velvet armchair, and hopes the Grey Lady will come and find her.brbr  
  
The Grey Lady had been her best friend during her first year at Hogwarts. Luna had seen the thestrals on her first carriage ride from the train to the school, but when she'd pointed them out to her fellow first years, they had all either laughed at her or started whispering to each other about how strange she was. The Grey Lady had come to her after the Welcoming Feast while she was sitting in this very armchair, staring out at the moon and feeling lonely amidst the chatter of all the other first years, who had made friends with each other immediately and were now sharing Fizzing Whizbees and games of wizard chess. Luna had never met a ghost before, as the house she lived in with her father wasn't very old, and she had spent the rest of the evening asking the Grey Lady questions, which, Luna had the impression, the Grey Lady had found very flattering.brbr  
  
Luna knows that the ghosts tend to avoid students who have recently lost friends or family, because they are afraid of being asked for favors that are not in their power to grant. The Grey Lady in particular loves to be admired, and dislikes disappointing anyone, and she had nearly gone away when Luna told her about her mother. But Luna only ever wanted to talk about her mother, never to her, and told the Grey Lady so.brbr  
  
The Grey Lady's willingness to listen had been a great comfort to her when she was eleven, and Luna wants very much to talk to her now. But she sits in the armchair for an hour, and the Grey Lady does not come. brbr  
  
Perhaps she is afraid Luna's changed her mind about talking to dead people, now both her parents are dead.brbr  
  
Perhaps the Grey Lady's avoiding her means her father really is dead by now.brbr  
  
Luna has heard the stories. She knows about Neville's parents, and Terry McKinnon's aunt. And Professor Snape admitted that her father was alive when they left him, though she had to trick him into saying it. Her father might still be alive yet—a gibbering, incontinent wreck, fit only to spend the rest of his life on the closed ward at St. Mungo's. Her father might be alive, and calling for her, and she was here, safely hundreds of miles from Ottery St. Catchpole.brbr  
  
Professor Snape thinks her father was stupid. Snape thinks he underestimated the risks he was taking by continuing to print issues of The Quibbler, and living outside the enclave. Snape doesn't understand—none of them did—how seriously her father had taken his work, or how many times he had asked Luna to go to the Burrow without him. He wouldn't go himself because he wouldn't abandon his printing press, which had no chance of fitting into the Weasleys' already overcrowded home. "There is work to be done for the man of letters," he had insisted, and Luna had believed he was right, and that there was also work for her. brbr  
  
So while her father had printed copies of the Order's manifesto, denouncing Fudge's ministry as a tool of Voldemort's ascension, Luna had been experimenting. The way her mother had once experimented, joyfully and recklessly, heedless of dangers. Her mother had died that way. Luna ought to have died that way.brbr  
  
A few days before she followed Harry into hiding, Ginny Weasley had come to visit. Dumbledore was taking her and Ron away to join Harry—somewhere, she said, they would have no need of invisibility cloaks. Harry had given his to Ginny before he left, and now Ginny wouldn't need it anymore—she'd given it to Luna, "just in case," and promised to collect it from her when she came back.brbr  
  
Invisibility cloaks, Luna knew from her father, were one of the rarest artifacts in the magical world. The majority of cloaks still in existence were in the possession of the Ministry of Magic and used by Aurors. None had been made since the sixteenth century, when the original family of craftsmen, who passed their trade secrets from father to son, ended in a family of twelve girls. No one since the inventor and his family had ever succeeded in charming a piece of cloth so that it was invisible when worn but visible otherwise. Similarly, no one had been able to counteract the corrosive nature of a simple invisibility spell, which was not difficult to perform, but had a nasty habit of either becoming permanent, or turning the charmed object into a puddle of sticky goo.brbr  
  
Luna, who was after all quite good at Charms, had set about making one for her father. Ginny's—Harry's—invisibility cloak alone did them no good, because neither of them would take it and leave the other; but Luna knew that if they were both invisible, they could escape together, and easily.brbr   
  
Once they were safely away, she would work on simplifying the process so that everyone in the Order of the Phoenix could have an invisibility cloak of his or her own. Defeating Voldemort, she felt, would be a very much simpler matter, if one had a completely invisible army.brbr  
  
She had been making progress, analyzing Harry's cloak and identifying the component spells that held it together. But not quickly enough to save her father. She hadn't even saved herself—Professor Snape had done that. By now her small W.C. laboratory will have been burnt to the ground with the rest of the house. If she recreates her work, which she is sure she could do quite easily, she can still help the Order. But she will never be able to help her father again. brbr  
  
That will be the strangest part, Luna thinks. No more trips to Sweden in search of the Crumple-Horned Snorkack. No more typesetting articles, or addressing issues of The Quibbler before sending them off by owl. A very large part of her life, she realizes, has been devoted to helping her father with things. She will have to fill those hours now by herself.brbr  
  
The hour she spends in the library is very long, and though the Grey Lady never comes it seems to Luna that Ravenclaw Tower is full of ghosts. She looks up every few minutes, thinking she's heard someone come through the portrait hole, but no one ever does.brbr  
  
The sun begins to rise, and she does not want to sleep, or read, or sit still any longer, so she climbs through the portrait hole and goes for a walk.brbr  
  
brbr  
  
Luna has been in the dungeons before—she took Potions there until her fifth year, when her O.W.L. came up 'Acceptable'—but no one, with the possible exception of the Weasley twins, ever went there just for the fun of it. Yet after she has walked the length of all the other floors, including the Astronomy Tower and the Owlery, she finds herself in a damp, cold corridor, stretching at least a hundred yards before her.brbr  
  
The majority of the rooms she passes appear to be storage facilities, all with wooden doors and iron locks, but half-way down the corridor she discovers to her left an open, circular chamber, into which five iron doors are set. There are tiny, narrow windows cut into each door just above Luna's eye level, and, peering through them, the room beyond each door appears to be dark and empty—except for the one in the middle, where a large fire is burning, if the cheerful red and gold light coming through the window and between the cracks at the sides of the door is any indication.brbr  
  
She studies this door for a moment, until she hears noises coming down the corridor behind her. She turns toward a nearby intersecting corridor, considering for a moment whether the suit of armor just after the aperture is large enough to hide her. Then she remembers that even if Professor Snape does find her here and decides to deduct points from Ravenclaw, none of her former house mates will ever know it was her fault, so she stands where she is and waits.brbr  
  
The noise, which is coming closer, sounds very much like the rattling of a silver tea set, but she doesn't see it or the person carrying it until they are almost on top of her, when she chances to look down and see two tiny house-elves, wearing black tea-towels emblazoned with the Hogwarts crest, and holding a steaming tray of food over their heads.brbr  
  
"Hello," she says, and is answered by two small squeaks, followed by a scramble to keep the tray from spilling its contents after their abrupt stop.brbr  
  
They lower the tray and hold it between them so they can look up. The one standing at front, a female with a button nose, smiles up at her. "Hello miss! Is you coming to see young master?"brbr  
  
"Yes," Luna says immediately.brbr  
  
"We is taking his breakfast inside now miss. We will bring another cup for you when we is done."brbr  
  
Luna beams at the house-elves as they scurry to the door, which springs open automatically—she suspects it would have been much harder to get through that door without them. Luna slips in behind them, and stands just inside the door as they carry the tray to a small table.brbr  
  
The room is furnished in Gryffindor colors, looking much as Luna supposes the dormitories in Gryffindor Tower do, though there is but one bed. There are two empty chairs by the table, and the hangings are drawn shut.brbr  
  
"We has your breakfast, young master! We is bringing fruit today, as young master asked. We is bringing another teacup for young miss, too. Is young master needing anything else before we go?"brbr  
  
"Wait—what—what do you mean? Who's there?"brbr  
  
The voice, muffled by the hangings, is familiar. But the person it reminds her of is meant to be dead.brbr   
  
She takes a few more steps closer to the bed, because dead people do not frighten her. brbr  
  
"Neville?"brbr  
  
The curtains begin to rustle violently, as though someone were trying to open them quickly but had got tangled up. When they do part, the voice becomes much clearer. "Who's there? Is that—are you—Luna?"brbr  
  
She walks slowly to the side of the bed where the curtains have opened. She stands where he can see her, and she can look at him. brbr  
  
His blue eyes, darker than usual against the pallor of his no-longer-round face, widen.brbr  
  
Six months have passed since the siege of Hogwarts, and the fall of Hogsmeade, where she saw Neville last. Luna was in the hospital wing, regrowing the bones in her right hand, when Harry carried him inside. Harry had ignored everyone and gone straight to an empty bed where Madam Pomfrey and Professor Dumbledore were waiting, and though Luna had pretended to sleep, she heard every word—"It was the killing curse, Voldemort sort of charged his way down the middle of his Death Eaters and hit Neville with it. Professor, I don't understand, did Voldemort learn about the rest of the prophecy—"brbr  
  
The house-elves, who have been watching them a bit nervously, finally disappear with a sharp crack. The noise brings Luna back to herself, and she takes a seat in a scarlet armchair upholstered in velvet.brbr  
  
"Hello Neville. I see you aren't dead. That's very nice. You look quite different." He is skeletally thin, his hair dull and falling below his ears.brbr  
  
"Yeah. I don't guess Voldemort would mistake me for Harry again, would he? Even from behind."brbr  
  
"Was that what happened?"brbr  
  
"Dumbledore thinks so. Or at least, I think that's what he thinks. He, um, doesn't talk to me much about—what happened."brbr  
  
One of the house-elves reappears with a second crack, carrying a plate of scones and a second cup for the tea, this time leaving quietly by the door.brbr  
  
"I expect you're actually here, aren't you?" Neville continues, without acknowledging the activity between them. "Sometimes I see things....people....though if I'd just imagined you, you'd probably still be wearing that necklace of butterbeer corks you always used to have..."brbr  
  
Luna nodded. "Millicent Bulstrode took it away from me during the battle. She'd always been jealous of it, she couldn't drink butterbeer herself because she had an allergy."brbr  
  
Neville pulls himself to the edge of the bed, and puts his feet on the floor with an effort. He is far thinner than she ever saw him at school, and his thinness makes him seem taller, even before he stands up. He pulls his dressing gown over his shoulders, and stares at the table laden with food, as though intimidated by the distance.brbr  
  
Luna reaches for the tea pot and pours a cup for each of them. This seems to give Neville the courage to take the four steps to the armchair on the other side of the table, and when he sits again he is breathing heavily.brbr  
  
"You're very ill," she says, reaching for a scone as Neville takes the first sip of his tea without sugar.brbr  
  
"I have been, ever since the battle. They really did think I was dead at first, and then I woke up because I was having these nightmares.... That was all I did for awhile, really, sleep and have nightmares." A few drops of sweat are visible on Neville's brow. "I see...things—only not people, I haven't seen anyone but the house-elves and Dumbledore for ages. McGonagall, and Professor Sprout, they used to come and visit me sometimes, but they haven't come lately. They said I was dangerous for awhile, and they still keep the door locked, only the house-elves can get in. I don't have a wand anymore. I'm really glad to see you, I haven't seen anyone since the battle. What are you doing here?"brbr  
  
"Professor Snape brought me."brbr  
  
"Snape? Why Snape, what's he doing, he isn't coming down here is he?" A flush of color suddenly overcomes the whiteness of his face and his fingers tighten around the handle of his tea cup.brbr  
  
"Professor Snape came to my house last night with the Death Eaters. They killed my father, I think. Professor Snape took us away and we Apparated somewhere, then we flew a carpet to the castle. He told me to go to Ravenclaw Tower when we got here and I don't know where he is now."brbr  
  
"Oh." Neville slumps back in his chair. "Oh. I'm really sorry about your dad, Luna. You think they killed him?"brbr  
  
"He wasn't dead when we left. Professor Snape told me afterward."brbr  
  
"That's so horrible!" Neville's hand jerks with such force that half the tea in his cup sloshes over the side, into the saucer and onto the leg of his pajamas. "I hate them! Those stupid Death Eaters and their stupid masks, how could Snape just leave him like that, how could you let him, they'll do horrible things to him—"brbr  
  
Luna watches him for a few seconds, then stands and leans over the table to take the tea cup out of his hand. She places it on the table beside the tea pot, then shakes out one of the elaborately folded cloth napkins and presses it to the stain on his knee. Neville falls back in his chair, breathing heavily, but allowing her to tend him. She waits until she can turn her face away from him before wiping the tears that have sprung into her eyes.brbr  
  
When she looks at Neville again he is staring at her, his eyes wide. "I'm sorry, Luna, I didn't mean to say all that. You—you know about my mum and dad. When I feel things now, it's like they're—bigger than they were before. Does that make any sense?"brbr  
  
"Yes."brbr  
  
Neville reaches for his cup again, but the tea in it has gone cold, and he makes a face. Luna pours him a second cup and pushes the sugar bowl toward him.brbr  
  
"He's probably dead by now," Neville offers after a second. "They don't keep them—alive very often. Usually only when they have a good reason. They were trying to get information out of my dad. Oh. They weren't—your dad wasn't—"brbr  
  
Luna shakes her head. "I think it was just because my dad publishes The Quibbler."brbr  
  
Neville frowns at her. "You mean they're still angry about that Rita Skeeter article? But that was years ago."brbr  
  
"Well, I imagine they are still angry about it, it was quite an effective article," Luna replies, smiling. "But I think they were rather angrier about the one we published two months ago. Professor Dumbledore wrote up a statement in the name of the Order, saying Death Eaters were controlling the Ministry of Magic and that 'Fudge's obsessions, both with power and purity of blood, have created so many footholds for Voldemort's influence within the Ministry that placing Ministry employees under Imperius would be to Voldemort both redundant and counterproductive.'" At Neville's look, she smiles again. "We reprinted that issue loads of times. I must have typeset it once a week, and then I had to fold them up and mail them. It's not the first article I've wound up memorizing. I still know quite a good one about Muggle systems of government being mirrored in isolated settlements of garden gnomes."brbr  
  
"That—that was really brave of you and your dad," Neville says, his voice quiet. "My gran told me that last time—during the last war—the Daily Prophet stopped running for while, because people were so scared of being singled out that they wouldn't even read about the attacks."brbr  
  
"The Daily Prophet has been running a series of articles on the Weird Sisters this week. Hermione Granger even canceled her subscription. She sent me an owl, and I got her a complimentary subscription to The Quibbler to replace it."brbr  
  
"Hermione?" Neville brightens palpably, though he doesn't go so far as to smile. "Have you seen her? How is she?"brbr  
  
"I haven't seen her lately, but during the battle she came into the hospital wing a few minutes before you did. She was in the bed next to me and we talked while our bones were regrowing, to take our mind off it."brbr  
  
"I don't know why I didn't ask Dumbledore already," Neville says, frowning down at his lap. "It's almost like I forgot her until just now, but I don't understand how I could, I used to think about her all the time." He looks up at Luna. "What about everyone else we knew? The rest of the D.A.?"brbr  
  
"Oh, everyone's fine. Well, Harry's gone away somewhere, and Ginny and Ron are with him, Dumbledore's hiding them some place, and most of us were hurt in the battle, but we're all fine now. We did think you were dead though, it was very sad."brbr  
  
"I'm sorry." Neville flushes again, though less brilliantly than he had at the thought of seeing Snape. "I don't know why they didn't tell anyone."brbr  
  
"What kind of things did you dream about? Are you still dreaming? You said you see things sometimes."brbr  
  
"Oh. Yeah, sometimes. The dreams aren't nearly as horrible as they were. They were mostly about people fighting, although Harry was in it a lot. I think...I think..." He speaks quickly as though afraid of being overheard. "I think it has something to do with Voldemort cursing me."brbr  
  
"Because that's how Harry got his visions."brbr  
  
"Yeah...only...I didn't die when he cursed me, but neither did he. I mean, the curse didn't backfire on him the way it did when he attacked Harry as a baby, so why would I start seeing into his head? And anyway, Harry's dreams turned out to be fake. Why would Voldemort bother sending me fake visions? I'm not going to be lured anywhere."brbr  
  
"Especially not as you're locked in."brbr  
  
"Right. I mean—wait, do you think—" Neville lowered his tea again, staring at her. brbr  
  
Luna stares back.brbr  
  
"They're still locking me in, and I haven't been violent at all, not since I woke up anyway, and that's been months ago. Am I going to see my gran being tortured in the Department of Mysteries? I wouldn't do that, I wouldn't run off. I know better than that! Do you hear me, I'm not going anywhere you tell me to!" He started to rock back and forth in his chair, clamping his hands suddenly to his ears, as though blocking out loud noises.brbr  
  
The door opens suddenly, and both of them jump. Neville turns wildly, and Luna stands up.brbr  
  
Professor Sprout strides through the door, followed by McGonagall, Dumbledore, and—Neville cries out softly, and turns a look on Luna—Snape. brbr  
  
"What—oh dear. Oh. Luna, we've been searching the whole castle for you. We were worried when we couldn't find you in Ravenclaw Tower—that's where Professor Snape said you had gone—but we heard voices coming from Neville's room...." Professor Sprout is looking rapidly from Luna to Neville, as though wondering if she ought to get between them.brbr  
  
"Ravenclaw Tower is where I instructed Miss Lovegood to remain," Snape says, watching Luna from over Sprout's shoulder.brbr  
  
"I went for a walk," Luna says to Professor Sprout while returning Snape's gaze. "The house-elves let me in to see Neville."brbr  
  
"That was very good of you, Miss Lovegood," Dumbledore says, startling everyone, from the back of the small crowd. "I'm afraid Mr Longbottom has had few visitors of late."brbr  
  
McGonagall says something low under her breath, that sounds like "Albus!" but Dumbledore does not react.brbr  
  
"If you will excuse the interruption, Neville, I must require a few minutes of Miss Lovegood's time. You are, of course, free, Miss Lovegood, to return and visit Neville any time you like. I will instruct the door to admit you."brbr  
  
He steps back through the door, holding it open with one long arm and stretching the other out into the hallway in invitation.brbr  
  
Luna looks from the professors gathered at the doorway to Neville. "It will be all right. I'll come back soon."brbr  
  
She walks to the door, past Professor Snape, who averts his gaze as soon as their eyes meet. He, Dumbledore, and McGonagall follow her through the exit. But the door, when it closes, does so not only on Neville, but on Professor Sprout.brbr  
  
In the corridor, Luna looks up at Professor Dumbledore, whose face is graver than she has seen it since the end of her fourth year. "So," he says quietly. "You seem to have discovered our secret."brbr  
  
McGonagall purses her lips, glancing back at the door to Neville's room every few seconds, while Snape stands at Dumbledore's left, looking down at Luna with dark eyes, brighter than they ought to be in the extraordinary emptiness of his sallow face.brbr  
  
div align="center"bEnd Part One brbr  
  
Interlude One: Title Schmitle/bbrbr  
  
a href="/sconivorous/HP.html"back to Harry Potter stories/a 


	5. Interlude I: What Molly Knew

Molly knows that death is coming for her family. She knows it with a certainty that haunts her day and night, so that the only time she is ever completely at ease is when all her family is in one house together.  
  
As the war progresses, those times grow farther and farther apart. And when they come, indistinct shadows seem to flit in the corners of the rooms where they laugh, oblivious and young.  
  
She begins to dream at night about Gideon and Fabian, her beautiful, clever brothers, the first people she thinks of, even now, whenever anyone mentions 'the twins.' Once, she had overheard Alastor Moody talking to Harry about them, saying that they had 'died like heroes.'  
  
In the daylight hours, she turns that phrase over and over in her mouth.  
  
They had died like heroes.  
  
Like heroes.  
  
They are dead, like heroes.  
  
Molly knows, again with certainty, that each and every one of her children, and Arthur, and Harry and Hermione, are all heroes too.  
  
This thought begins to keep her awake at night. Not until then do the dreams stop.  
  
Molly works hard for the Order, mostly in an attempt to distract herself from her anxiety. Someone has to find a place for the children who have already been orphaned by the war. And while other people have recognized the need to protect the families of Muggleborn wizards, no one seems to realize, until Molly points it out, that Muggles can't use magic to wash clothes or cook meals or heat the temporary shelters where they must live without electricity. Tonks can joke all she likes, but what most of the Order need isn't faster brooms or deadlier strategies, but a stern tutorial in domestic charms.  
  
She takes care of the homeless children during the day. Many of them are so young that this entire war will one day be no more to them than a feeling of residual, inexplicable unease. Unless they come too near a dementor, they will never know the sounds of their parents' voices. They run about the Weasley house and play like all children do, though sometimes they pause in the middle of their games and ask "Where's mama? Where's papa?" They cry when Molly cannot answer, but her tears are still fresh long after theirs are forgotten.  
  
In the evening she consults the Relocation team, and, wearing an out-of-date Muggle dress, Apparates to the homes of Muggleborn wizards. There, with as much authority as she can muster, she explains to the parents of Hogwarts students why they must leave behind their homes and all their possessions in order to flee an invisible threat from a world they still believe is half-imaginary. In fifty percent of all cases, with the consent (and occasionally the assistance) of their children, she is forced to Stun them and transport them to the protected site by means of an illegal Portkey. Hermione's parents, tired of being treated like children who don't know what's good for them, had to be prised from behind a closet door.  
  
When she comes home at night, Molly kisses those of her own children who are stopping in between assignments, and tries to keep most of the trembling out of her voice when she inquires after their day. There is a comforting normality to the way Ron and Ginny still half try to wiggle out of her arms when she hugs them, down-playing her concerns with familiar grimaces. It is Percy, brittle and apologetic, whose manner is foreign, a reminder of trust betrayed and innocence lost.  
  
Molly sits in a chair and watches Ginny scream with laughter as Hermione comes off the worse in a game of Gobstones and gets a face full of foul smelling liquid. Hermione evaporates the mess with her wand, and remarks that she still doesn't see the point of the game. Ron looks up from the chess match he is playing with Harry, to say that she just doesn't like being bad at something for a change. Instead of the irritation Molly is expecting, Hermione smiles, as though Ron's just made a joke. This causes Ginny to roll her eyes at Harry, who is looking at her over Hermione's head.  
  
"You know, mother, it's really rather strange to see you sitting completely still," Percy says, as Molly is listening fondly to the chatter. She realizes, startled, that it's true. When the children were growing up, her hands were never idle, could never afford to be. None of the others are as observant as Percy, and he doesn't mention it again, but a few minutes later she leaves the parlor and comes back with a basket of knitting.  
  
Later in the evening, she happens to glance over at Harry, and realizes, with an almost physical jolt of shock, that he is looking at her. Their gaze only meets for a second before he turns away, but there is a look in his eyes that she recognizes immediately.  
  
She shouldn't be so surprised. She's known for years that none of the normal rules apply to Harry, but it is still a shock to see him watching his friends with the same tense sorrow he must be able to see in her own eyes.  
  
He can sense it as well—the near stench of loss that lingers in her family's wake. He, too, knows what's coming.  
  
But then, he always has. That is his gift.  
For the first time, Molly can appreciate both the sorrow and the burden of it.  
  
Her days are very full, but there are still hours that hang heavy with silence, after Arthur is asleep and the children have grown quiet. These are the times when she finds herself thinking more and more of her brothers, how they lived and died.  
  
She sees bits of them in all her children: in Bill's dandyish long hair, in Charlie's recklessness, and in Fred and George's bright, misapplied talent. Percy has Gideon's studiousness, Ron, Fabian's thirst for self-improvement, and Ginny....well. She hasn't got her sly ways from Arthur's cheerful, earnest family, has she?  
  
She'd had no choice other than to stay well out of the fighting, nineteen years ago. Pregnant, first with Fred and George, then with Ron, tethered to a house with four tiny children to look after, she was unable to do anything for Arthur or the Order besides keep herself and the boys as far away from risk as possible. The children had come quite close together, and she was still young enough then to think her lot a harsh one, stranded from the reassurance of adult contact and having nothing to do when the boys were in bed besides fret herself sick. She longed to fight, as Gideon and Fabian were fighting, to know what was happening as it happened, and have some more immediate gauge of theirs and Arthur's safety than the illegible, heavily coded messages that arrived by infrequent and exhausted owls.  
  
When Gideon and Fabian were killed, Arthur came home for two whole days, a longer period of time than they had spent together since the war began. He had minded the children while she lay in the bed, sobbing herself senseless. When the boys were occupied, he slipped in the bedroom and held her and they cried together.  
  
After Arthur left again, Molly went rummaging through the Muggle rubbish he kept in the shed outside. A half hour's searched yielded a broken clock that chimed thirteen times at midnight. Over the next fortnight she spent every spare second of her day experimenting with locator spells, cloning charms, and arithmantic calculations designed to trace magical signatures. She had bits of hair from Arthur and each of the boys, and only thought to snip a lock from her own head when she had finished spelling everyone else.  
  
Molly had never been brilliant at her schoolwork—not that there was anything wrong with her mind, as her teachers liked to remind her, but she, like most of her children, had lacked somewhat in concentration. This project, however, was nothing like anything she'd ever done for school, and she worked harder at it than she had worked at anything in her life. She found old school books, Arthur's Arithmancy and Transfiguration notes (he had been Head Boy, after all) and twice only just stopped herself sending owls to old teachers for advice—not the thing to do when there was a war on, she told herself. When at last she finished, two months after first conceiving of the idea, she hung the finished product over the mantel and watched in satisfaction as the hand bearing the legend "Arthur Weasley" sailed smoothly to the position on the clock face labeled "Work," bypassing "Mortal Peril" without a pause. The other six hands, representing herself and each of the children, were piled up across the word "Home."  
  
After the war ended, and Molly had altered the clock to reflect Ron's and Ginny's births, Arthur refitted the mechanism into the body of an old grandfather clock. They placed it by the door, where it has stood ever since. There are times when she regrets having ever made the clock; she has wasted so many hours studying it, dreading the moment when one of the hands will leap dramatically to the left or the right. Sometimes she fantasizes a history rewritten, one in which she creates the clock a month earlier, in time to make hands for Gideon and Fabian. She might have been able to help them—with sufficient warning, she could have apparated to Hogsmeade, raised the help that would have saved their lives...  
  
On the other hand, she can too easily imagine what it would have felt like, watching their hands drop from "Mortal Peril" to the great space at the bottom of the clock, where nothing is written at all. She has never adjusted to the stagnating horror of helplessness, despite all her experience with it.  
  
She watches the clock now, most of the hands pointing at "Work" and the rest at "Sleep." Only Molly's hand, though she looks right past it, is indecisive, trailing somewhere between "Mortal Peril" and "Traveling."  
  
The letter, in McGonagall's spiky, studious handwriting, says simply, "Thomas and Helen Creevey, 46 Swandham Lane, Holloway Gardens, Kent."  
  
According to the schedule for the Muggle protection programme, the Creeveys, parents of Dennis and Colin, are not down for relocation until next month. When she receives a letter like this, it means that Snape has given them recent intelligence; Death Eater have slated the family for a raid, tonight, tomorrow, or any time in between.  
  
There is a stated protocol for emergency relocations. Molly is to find a partner, Apparate no nearer than half a mile from the Muggle home, and cast a revealing charm to determine whether it is safe to enter. Once inside, they are to Stun the family, and Portkey them immediately to Grimmauld Place.  
  
Molly almost never abides strictly by the protocol. They might as well be Death Eaters themselves, behaving as though magic gives them privileges that supersede basic courtesy and the free will of others.  
  
It is six o'clock when the letter arrives, already full dark. She has a superstitious mistrust of the darkness, and the deeds it may hide. There is no time to Apparate all over London until she finds someone she can bully into a mission so few of the Order seem to consider a priority.  
  
She changes into her Muggle clothes, wraps herself in a cloak, and with one last glance at the clock in the hall she Apparates to Kent.  
  
She does not know Rabastan Lestrange personally, but she knows that the grinning figure in aristocratic robes who answers her knock at the Creevey's door isn't likely to be a Muggle milkman.  
  
Molly is no duelist. Outside of Defense classes at school, she's probably only cast half a dozen curses in her life. But she grew up with two older brothers, and when she sees the Death Eater leering in the doorway before her, she raises her wand reflexively and casts the first spell that comes to mind—the first Gideon ever taught her.  
  
Lestrange doubles over in a screaming fit of laughter as the Tickling Hex brushes every square inch of his skin with feather light touches. Molly shoves her way past him, scanning the parlor just behind.  
  
The slight body of a fair-haired man is crumpled, motionless, on the floor, half-hidden by a sofa. There is no sign of anyone else.  
  
She can still hear Lestrange laughing in the doorway behind her. She looks around until she spots a staircase, and then she Apparates.  
  
There are only two rooms on the first floor. Both are dark, with closed doors. She pauses only a second, then goes by instinct to the one closest by.  
  
A woman with dark, curly hair is huddled in the bath tub. She has torn the sheer plastic shower curtain from its rings in a panic, and she is clutching it to her chest, as though it could somehow shelter her.  
  
Molly grabs the first thing she sees in the half light—a hairbrush on the cabinet, long dark hair stuck in its bristles. She grabs it in one hand, and touches her wand to it with the other, muttering "Portus."  
  
There is a loud crack at the landing of the stairs behind her. She does not turn to look at Lestrange before throwing the hairbrush at Helen Creevey, who is watching her with wide, blank eyes.  
  
In the instant before it strikes, Molly worries that the woman is sunk too deeply in shock to react. But reflex takes over, and Helen Creevey throws up a hand to guard her face. She doesn't catch the brush, but the momentary contact of deflecting it is enough. She disappears, shower curtain and all.  
  
Gideon and Fabian had died in a duel with a party of Death Eaters in a small Muggle town, protecting the villagers and giving most of them time to escape. Outnumbered three to one, they held out for six hours and were killed in almost the same moment.  
  
She has imagined those six hours many times in the years since their deaths. She wonders now, as she smiles and faces Lestrange, if they had seen death barreling toward them. If that bare bit of prescience is a family trait.  
  
She doesn't have time to process the thought before the curse has worked its way past the Death Eater's snarl and knocked her, senseless and inert, to the floor of the loo.  
  
But there is just enough time, before death sweeps her off her feet, to think of her family.  
  
She holds them in her mind, and sees them, for the first time in many months, with no hint or shadow of uncertainty clinging to them.  
  
She doesn't need that assurance in order to die. There is nothing to cling to in death, nothing she can carry with her.  
  
But in the moment before dying, it is enough. And there is time to recognize it for a gift, more than she would have ever thought to ask for.


	6. chapter six

**Part Two**

6.

"What are you doing?"

A glass vial—she'd waited to speak until he was handling an empty one—slips from Snape's fingers, and shatters on the stone floor of the potions classroom.

Luna smiles, politely, as he sees her and bares his teeth, converting the expression at the last second to an unpleasant smile.

"_Miss_ Lovegood." He repairs the vial and takes his time filling it with thick black liquid before he speaks again. "I believe you are already in violation of the promise you made the Headmaster just this morning."

"Oh no. I only promised Professor Dumbledore that I wouldn't wander where it wasn't safe."

"You think yourself safe here?"

"Well." She's not sure how he wants her to reply to that—anything she says will sound like an insult. "Rescuing me last night was a lot of hard work. If you wanted to kill me I expect you would have done it before now." 

Snape's thin lips stretch into a smile, but his eyes remain on his cauldron. "Ah, but death is not the only danger facing you. It is merely the final one."

Luna smiles to herself in turn, because she is always delighted by a neatly phrased truth. She doesn't actually laugh, though. Her laughter makes people uncomfortable. It took her years to realize this.

She walks closer to Snape's work bench, where three small cauldrons are perched over boxes of Portable Flame. The air on this side of the classroom is thick with steam and the scent of boiling fennel. Snape is slicing fangorn weed into strips with a silver knife, then gathering them up with the long, pale fingers of his left hand and throwing them into the cauldron closest by.

"I'm left-handed, too," Luna says, watching his hands and thinking of her father trimming news parchment to proper magazine size with his long-handled paper knife.

"I am not left handed. I am ambidextrous." Snape says it carelessly, as though parting with the information costs him nothing. "Many potions, such as this one, require certain herbs to be cut by the left hand, and others by the right. It is a skill all potions-masters learn of necessity."

"Oh." She studies the scarred surface of his work bench, and the reflection of her face in a patch of smooth, polished wood. "You haven't answered my question, you know."

"What I am doing, Miss Lovegood, is brewing a potion. I realize your skills in that area are mediocre at best, but I would expect you to at least recognize the process when you saw it."

She blinks, and several different replies come to the tip of her tongue. She isn't angry. She knows he doesn't know any better. But she wants to correct him, all the same.

"The potion you're brewing is called Tears of Lethe. It's a restricted potion, and brewing it without Ministry dispensation is an offense punishable by six months in Azkaban."

Snape's knife-hand becomes motionless. His head comes up, sharply, and he watches her for a moment before his face relaxes again, and he returns his attention to the herbs he is shredding.

"Well spotted, Miss Lovegood. Obviously you possess a potions expertise which you never chose to demonstrate in my classroom."

"I know quite a lot about poisons." 

This earns her another glance, shorter this time, but keener. "Tears of Lethe is not a poison."

"It's an antidote to memory-modification curses. I've always considered them poisonous."

She can see his eyebrows arch, and his lips twist in another small smile. "I would not disagree with that assessment."

She watches him measure a careful spoonful of clear liquid—harvested tears—and add it to the cauldron. She counts the number of times he stirs the mixture, clockwise, into the potion: forty two. If they talked like this for the entire morning, Luna suspects the rhythm of their conversation would continue to match the rhythm of his chopping, measuring, and stirring. Ever since she came into the room, she has been timing her comments to actions of his hands.

"Do you have Ministry dispensation?" she says into nearly a minute of silence.

Snape laughs, and the sound is frightening. She wonders why she should feel that way, when she is certain she has never heard him laugh before. Then she remembers listening as Death Eaters overcame her father with their curses, how the high, wild sound of their laughter had drifted up the stairs to find her in her hiding place.

Snape is speaking, so she forces her attention outward again. "Cornelius Fudge's Ministry would not, at the present time, grant me dispensation to breathe the free air if I required it."

She does not miss the fact that he has not precisely answered the question. "For whom are you brewing it?"

"That is none of your concern."

"You can tell me anyway." She sits on the top of a nearby desk. "I already know your most important secrets, after all."

"Indeed, Miss Lovegood?" He isn't smiling anymore. "Much good may they do you." 

"Well, I only wanted you to know that you can trust me with them."

He doesn't miss a beat. "I do not require your trust."

Luna blinks, and sits up straighter by an inch. She'd prepared herself, before she came, not to be put off by his manner. But he has changed in the few hours that have passed since they were in Grimmauld Place together, when he seemed at every moment to be struggling with a sympathy he did not want to reveal.

She only knows one way to respond when she is out of sorts, and that is to take refuge in a degree of frankness that repels more often than it attracts. She knows that it will not improve matters, but she finds that all she cares about now is disturbing him. Forcing him to look at her.

"I wish you would stop disliking me." He freezes, and she hurries on. "You saved me from those Death Eaters, and now I owe you a life-debt." _I can feel it already,_ she thinks to herself, _glowing in my mind like a giant Remembrall, with your head looming up inside it, all distorted by the concave lense._ "It's a very uncomfortable feeling, knowing I repulse you."

Snape is looking at her now, and his face is unusually white. He takes a deep breath before turning his stare deliberately back to his cauldron. 

Luna counts under her breath. Exactly twenty seconds later, he lifts the cauldron from the fire, and places it on a slab of marble at the far end of the counter. When the cauldron's lid is firmly in place, he walks around the end of the workbench. Before Luna quite realizes he is moving in her direction, he has seized her arm, pulled her from the desk, and begun marching her toward the door of the classroom.

"I have no interest," he says, "in fulfilling whatever romantic or heroic fantasy you have conjured for me." His long fingers are digging painfully into the flesh of Luna's arm. "I took you out of that house last night because it suited my purposes. Had circumstances been any different, I would have left you to die with as little regret as I left your father."

Now Luna tries to free herself, but his grip is inflexible, and his voice, soft and low when he first began speaking, grows in volume and intensity. "I know your penchant for theatrical displays, but I do not share it. I am sincere in the distaste I have always shown for you, and nothing which has happened in the last twelve hours has altered it. You will leave now, and you will not disturb me again, or so help me, I will demonstrate how little safety you may enjoy in my presence."

He shoves Luna through the door and releases her in the same motion, so that she stumbles over the threshold. She throws one hand out to catch the door frame, and uses the leverage to spin around and face Snape, who remains standing in the doorway, staring down at her, his features arranged in stone.

Luna lifts her chin, so that she is nearly looking him in the eye. She can feel the skin above her elbow throbbing in long streaks the shape of his fingers.

"You wouldn't be standing there still if you weren't waiting for something," she says.

His lip curls, and the dungeon door shuts in her face with the saturated thud of wood meeting stone. 

She turns and stumbles down the dungeon corridor, in the opposite direction of the stairs leading back to the ground floor of the castle and the company of other people.

She is shaken, no doubt. But all in all, the encounter had gone rather better than she anticipated.

Then she hears her name, shouted from somewhere behind her. Because the voice is feminine, familiar, and patently not Snape, she stops and turns.

Hermione Granger is striding toward her, robes billowing, tendrils of hair straying rebelliously from a bun at the nape of her neck. At the sight of her, relief spreads through Luna's body from head to toe.

"Luna." Hermione stops, breathless, in front of her, mere inches before they would have collided. "I've been looking all over for you. Why are you down here?"

They are standing so close together that when Hermione waves a hand to waft the loose hair from her eyes, Luna can feel the air brushing her cheek, and she is reminded suddenly of her mother.

"I didn't feel like staying in Ravenclaw Tower," she says in answer, because she had promised Snape that she would keep his secrets.

"No, of course you didn't." Hermione falls to studying her, the corners of her mouth puckering in a very McGonagall-esque way. She reaches forward rather hesitantly, but there is strength and firmness in the grip of her hand. "Why don't you come up to the kitchens with me? Remus and I are having some tea before we head out again, we've neither of us had anything in ages, and I'm sure you haven't either. Do come, I'm sure you'll feel much better for eating something."

Luna doesn't reply, but neither does she resist when Hermione begins pulling her in the direction of the nearest staircase. Her head is beginning to feel swimmy, and she realizes, in a detached way, that it has been a long night.

And suddenly she finds that there is an unexpected pleasure in being taken up by someone like Hermione, in relaxing into the guiding hand of her gentle bossiness. If Hermione had not come looking for her, Luna would probably have sunk to the stone floor of the dungeon and fallen quietly asleep. She is patient by nature, but it is hard to keep going forward when with every step she takes she feels more and more as if she is moving under water.

"Did you get the owls I sent you?" she asks Hermione after a moment. "I asked my father to give you a complimentary Quibbler subscription, after you canceled the Prophet." 

"Oh! Yes, I did. I'm so sorry I didn't owl you back, I was really very grateful, but things were so hectic." She is blushing. Luna can hardly remember the last time anyone paid so much attention to her feelings, though logically she knows that she was with her father mere hours ago. "Are you—I mean—do you think you'll keep the paper going?"

"I suppose I'll try, if the Death Eaters haven't burned the house and the presses down." 

A moment of stricken silence falls between them, in which Hermione's cheeks flush an even deeper red. She seems to be on the point of an apology Luna would rather not hear, but she only says, "Oh." Then, "Yes, of course."

They are nearing the end of corridor, and the staircase leading to the kitchens. Hermione's steps quicken, but in the next moment Luna stops and pulls away from her.

"Luna." She cannot see Hermione's face, but she can hear guilt and worry in her voice. "I'm really very sorry—"

"What is this room?" 

Hermione frowns, then follows the track of Luna's gaze to a semi-circular chamber hewn into the unbroken stone wall. Five iron doors are set in the curving aperture, all with narrow slits for windows. They stand just above Luna's eye level, and she can see nothing through them.

"Oh." Hermione's voice is suddenly brisk, and Luna feels for a moment that she has gone back in time, that Hermione-the-Head-Girl is standing beside her. "Those are nothing. Just some old closets. Come on, I'm about to faint dead from hunger."

She takes hold of Luna's arm again, and again Luna lets herself be led. But as she looks back over her shoulder at the rooms in the round chamber, her eyes settle briefly on the door in the middle. Through the small window she can see the cheerful red light of a large fire, and the flickering black shadow of movement inside.

Professor Lupin is drinking tea as he waits for them. Luna doesn't spot him just at first—she's never seen the Hogwarts kitchens before, and they are far larger than she expected—but Hermione knows where she is going, and Lupin gets to his feet as they approach.

"Luna, it's good to see you again." Lupin steps around the edge of the table and grips her hand briefly. Luna doesn't resent this, but she is beginning to think that she has been touched and grabbed by more people in the last twelve hours than ever before in her life. "Sit down, please, I believe the house-elves are—yes, here they come now." 

Lupin takes his seat again, mostly to make room for the enormous platter zooming toward, supported invisibly by four diminutive bodies. Hermione, faced with the need for a quick decision, looks from Luna to Lupin, then slides onto the bench opposite Lupin and indicates Luna should join her there.

"Here is your tea, misses and master," says a voice from beneath the platter, as a large silver teapot, a plate of bread and cheese, and a large cake glide smoothly toward the table, followed by cups and dishes and silverware.

"Thank you very much," Hermione says, beaming. "What is your name?"

"I is called Dilly, miss," the lead house-elf replies.

"I'm very pleased to meet you, Dilly." She extends her hand. "My name is Hermione. Would you join us for a cup of tea?"

Dilly's eyes grow very wide, and she take a step backward. "Oh, no miss. I thanks you, miss, for asking, but there is work that is needing to be done. Thank you, miss, goodbye!"

Hermione watches the four house-elves beat a hasty retreat in the direction of the ovens, and sighs. "Well, it's an improvement, anyway. Last year they all hid every time I came near the kitchens."

Professor Lupin reaches somewhat hastily for his tea and takes a long, noisy sip.

For the next several minutes they eat and do not talk. Luna does not feel any interest in the food initially, but after she takes her first sip of tea she becomes aware of a gnawing hunger, as though the searing liquid had awakened her stomach to long-dead sensation. She makes a sandwich of two enormous slices of bread and a huge wedge of cheese, tearing bite-sized pieces away with her teeth and avoiding eye-contact with either of her companions. They are equally hungry—or perhaps they are just polite. Either way, Luna feels herself relaxing for the first time in what seems an eternity. 

When at last she is full to bursting, and just on the point of excusing herself to find a bed, Lupin speaks.

"I assume you'll be staying here at the castle, Luna? Or do you have family elsewhere?"

Luna blinks. Feels the grip of her father's hand around her elbow, shoving her up the staircase, while the front door of their house shivers under the weight of a Death Eater's fist. "I have no other family."

Lupin nods in that grave manner which seems always calculated to avoid any possible offense. "I only ask because Moody will want to know how to contact you once we have news of your father."

"What news can he have? My father is dead."

Hermione's forehead puckers and she stares into the bottom of her teacup.

"Of course. But he thought you would like to know...if we find his body..."

"He can burn the body. I have no need of it."

"Luna." Hermione looks sideways at Lupin, then shifts her gaze across the table toward Luna. "I know things have been happening rather quickly for you. Would you—like to talk about what happened?"

Luna shrugs, and her shoulders feel heavy. "There's little to tell. When we realized the house wards were being attacked, my father made me go upstairs to hide. I had just put on the invisibility cloak when they came in, and then Professor Snape was there. That's all."

Lupin shifts forward slightly. "Your father put himself between you and the Death Eaters."

"Yes." Luna studies the seams between the wooden planks of the table. "We knew they would be coming soon. We—I—was working on an experiment that would have let us escape together. But I didn't have time to finish it."

"I'm so sorry Luna." Hermione's eyes are bright.

Luna nods. "I know you are. But you needn't be. It's not as if we didn't know it was coming."

There is precisely enough time for Hermione and Lupin to trade one more quick, worried glance before the kitchens are swamped in darkness, and the air around them explodes into thunder. The four walls of the kitchen shudder violently, as though caught in a sudden cold wind, and in the next moment Luna realizes that she is lying on the floor, fallen beside her overturned chair.

The air is thick, filled with meaningless noises, and her ears are ringing. She is surrounded by the fluttering movement of the house-elves, their shrieks contrasting horribly with the leaden echoes that have filled the kitchen. She claps her hands over her ears to block the sound, but she can still feel them, needling, under her skin.

She is aware of the chaos around her, and she knows she ought to be worried about what has just happened. But somehow the floor beneath her feels soft as any bed, and the desire to sleep is incredibly strong; she hasn't felt so warm and safe since the battle of Hogwarts six months ago, when Madam Hooch carried her away from the fighting, and Madam Pomfrey tucked her into bed and gave her Dreamless Sleep potion. She feels as though is lying in the berth of a boat at sea, the water rocking her into oblivion.

She has no sooner than closed her eyes, however, when a hand grips her arms and jerks her upright, though she has become little more than dead weight. She hears Lupin's voice, whispering "_Ennervate,_" and though there is nothing to see when she opens her eyes she can feel the artificial energy of the reviving spell tingling in her arms and legs. She gets to her feet, unsteady in the darkness.

Lupin does not release her arm. If anything, he is gripping it more tightly, and she can feel the heat and the shock of his breath against the side of her neck when he speaks. "Luna, listen to me. The wards have been compromised. You must get out of the castle, the Death Eaters will kill everyone they catch."

Luna's mouth is dry, and her head is strangely light on her shoulders. She stares in the direction of his voice, trying to find his eyes. "I'm not going to leave you here."

There is a low groan close to them; the voice is Hermione's, but Lupin ignores it, his voice pitched low. "Do you know the statue of the one-eyed witch?"

"Yes?" 

"Tap it with your wand and say '_dissendium_.' There is a hidden passage inside that will take you into Hogsmeade. You can Apparate from there."

She can hear distant wails, the thuds and crashes of dozens of bodies trying to navigate a maze of overturned tables and chairs. Panic begins to lance through the dim fog in her mind. She wrenches her arm from Lupin's grip and takes a step back. "What's wrong with Hermione?"

"She's injured. I'll stay with her, we'll both be right behind you." 

"No." Tears begin to knot at the base of her throat. "I'm not leaving you here. I can help you with Hermione." She swallows hard. "Do you understand me, I'm not leaving anyone else behind."

Her eyes are beginning to adjust to the darkness now, and she can the outline of Lupin, standing in front of her. Then she is blinded again, as the end of his wand ignites between them. She throws a hand up to shield her eyes, and begins fumbling in her robes for her own wand.

"Luna, please listen." Lupin's voice is hoarse. "The upper floors of the castle are breached right now, but those of us in the dungeons and cellars have a chance to escape. Listen to me!" he says, as she opens her mouth to protest. "Snape is down here too, but he doesn't know about the passageway. You have to lead him there. You know why the Death Eaters cannot take him."

Luna looks at him in the dim light. "I'll tell him and come back for you." 

"There's no time." Lupin's eyes are wild. "You have to do this, Luna. You owe him your life."

She can now see Hermione, still and pale, leaning into Lupin's arm. Blood is trickling down the side of her face. Luna cannot tell if she is breathing.

She looks at Lupin again. Then she turns, stretches her wand before her, and begins to run.


	7. chapter seven

7.

She falls three times before she reaches the kitchen doors. It does not occur to her to use magic to clear her path until she trips over a teapot and strikes her head on the sharp edge of an overturned table. When she reaches the corridor she takes the hem of her robe in hand and pulls it up to her knees, running down the pitch black corridor as she has never run in her life.

The struggle on the upper floors of the castle echoes like thunder over her head. She expects at any moment to come face to face with the fat, leering Death Eater she stunned at her house, what seems an age ago. But she meets no one.

Fear mounts with every door she passes. They all look alike even when the hallway is lit, and the farther she runs the more certain she is that she has forgotten the location of Snape's office, that she must turn around and go back to find him.

When she spots a thin beam of light emanating from the crack beneath a door ahead of her she sobs once, in relief, and runs straight at it, turning the latch and throwing her weight against it. There is no resistance, not even a ward, and when the door bursts open she nearly falls to the ground.

Snape is standing at his desk, looking at her as though he has never seen her before. His left hand is raised, a long, narrow vial of shimmering red liquid poised inches from his lips.

She knows, without knowing how, what the potion is, and what he is doing with it.

She opens her mouth to speak, and finding that she has no breath, gasps the words between great gulps of air.

"We have—to get out of here." She lifts a hand to wipe away the blood and the perspiration that is tricking into her eyes. "Professor Lupin told me—there's a passageway—upstairs."

He continues to watch her, neither moving nor speaking. Then his hand shifts, bringing the vial a fraction of an inch closer to his mouth.

A bolt of white heat flashes in front of her eyes, and in that moment of strange blindness she hears the chime of breaking glass. When the fog clears seconds later, she finds her wand pointed at Snape, who is looking at the remains of the now shattered vial in his hand. The red potion is dripping from his fingers, and blood is welling from three different small cuts on his face.

He looks from the vial to Luna. His eyes are wider than she would have ever thought possible.

She lowers her wand. "I owe you a life debt. You owe me the opportunity to repay it."

He takes a long, shuddering breath, and in that moment seems to come back to himself. He casts the broken vial onto his desk, and he speaks as she has never heard him speak, his voice tired and neutral, as though they had never spent a night flying on a magic carpet together. "The grounds have certainly been taken, and there is no way out of the castle that does not cross them."

"You haven't listened to me. Lupin told me how to reach a secret passageway that leads into Hogsmeade. It's just upstairs, but we have to go now or we won't reach it without being seen."

The corner of Snape's mouth assumes its familiar position, crooked a half inch close to his nose than the other half. The sight is strangely reassuring to Luna. "That is absurd. There are no secret passageways out of the castle that I do not know about."

Luna smiles back. "Yes of course, because Harry never managed to sneak out of the castle without you knowing how he managed it."

Snape's chin jerks up, and his nostrils flare. "Lupin. Of course. I should have realized...." He sighs suddenly, and shakes his head. "All right. Let us see this hidden passage of yours. I warn you, though, we are not likely to find our way to any portion of the castle not already under enemy control." He searches out his wand from amongst the clutter on top of his desk, and averts his eyes. "And I will not risk capture."

Luna doesn't speak, or otherwise acknowledge his words, except in spinning on her heel and walking back toward the door of his office. She hears the soft click of Snape's heels against the stone floor as he passes, then overtakes her, shoving her to side so that he is the first through the door. He pauses there a moment, then looks back at Luna over his shoulder. 

"I have a brief chore to accomplish. You will wait here for me."

He is yards away before she can even open her mouth to protest, walking back in the direction of the kitchens and disappearing around a corner only a short distance down the corridor. She can hear the rusty complaint of a turning metal hinge, as a door long sealed is opened, then shut. Seconds later Snape has rounded the corner again in her direction, and before she has time to think of asking what he had done they are running together in the direction of the north stair.

The stairwell itself is deserted. The ground floor, however, is swarming with voices, none of them familiar to Luna save from nightmares of past battles.

Snape leans close to her. "The passage. It is hidden somewhere near the statue of the one-eyed witch, am I right?"

"Yes," Luna whispers, feeling somewhat cheated. "Tap it and say '_dissendium_.'" "Ahh." In the dim light she can see the flash of his teeth, and she feels suddenly sorry for Harry. 

She takes a step forward, intending to peer around the corner into the landing above, but Snape restrains her. "Wait," he says, and, withdrawing his wand, taps her on the head with it, whispering something unintelligible. He then does the same to himself, and, fascinated, she see him melt into the stone wall behind him.

"There's a spell for invisibility," she whispers.

"Camouflage only. It won't fool them if they are paying close attention, but we may be able to slip past in a distraction. Stay behind me."

He emerges into the hallway with long, slow steps, keeping his back to the wall. Luna walks close behind him. From where they stand the one-eyed witch is only a few yards away, a mere dash across the corridor to the round inset of enormously high windows. But several feet down the corridor a group of Death Eaters are marching seven abreast in their direction, and collapsed in their wake is the motionless form of Professor Sprout.

Luna claps a hand over her mouth to muffle the sound of a gasp. She feels Snape's hand gripping her shoulder. 

"We will wait until they pass before we cross," he whispers, almost too softly to hear. "They will see our shadows if we stand in direct light."

"Can't we help her?" 

"No."

The Death Eaters are near enough now that Luna can feel the air moved by the swirl of their robes. She recognizes three of them from the battle at the Department of Mysteries, but the only one she knows by name is Lucius Malfoy, cruel and beautiful as an ancient stone sculpture. Snape's fingers dig into her flesh, and she stares hard at the Death Eaters as though she could wound them with her gaze.

She realizes, in that moment, that she would strike them if she could—use curses she has only read about to rip their skin from their bodies, cause their hearts to burst in their chests. She wants to attack them now more than she has ever wanted anything in her life. She would die, gladly, if she could kill just one of them.

Snape breathes, slowly, beside her, and she comes back to herself, remembering the debt she owes him. She is, in a very real sense, responsible for him now.

There will be time to die later.

She does not move until Malfoy and the others are so far down the corridor she can no longer hear their footsteps. Then she pulls away from Snape, and runs toward Professor Sprout.

"Luna," Snape whispers, and when she kneels beside the professor's body he is beside her.

. Sprout lies on her side, no wound or blemish apparent. When Luna turns her on her back she sees a thin trickle of blood running from the corner of her mouth.

"Come away. You can do nothing for her." 

"There may be others." Luna cannot tear her gaze from the wide, shocked eyes in the kindly face, still and paler than anything she has ever seen.

"Do you wish to join them?" He gets to his feet. There is no impatience or reprimand in his voice. "You cannot let yourself think about it.

"How?" she says, rising.

He does not answer. Luna closes the dead woman's eyes, and walks briskly to the statue, cold in the morning light.

The incantation works on the first try. The hump on the statue of the one-eyed witch opens, and Luna places one foot on the pedestal, preparing to climb in, when she notices that Snape is standing a few feet off, not moving.

She steps down. "You go first."

He does not look at her. He is gazing out the windows, a hand clenched at his side. "I am a teacher. I am entrusted with the defense of this castle."

"I won't leave without you."

"I can make you, if necessary."

"Not unless you are a coward." 

He spins to face her, his nostrils wide and his mouth open. 

Luna stands completely still, afraid that any movement will send him running the other direction. "You would have poisoned yourself when you thought there was no escape. Now there is an escape, you refuse it. Are you so afraid of living that you will go out of your way to die?"

"You know nothing." Snape's eyes are narrowed.

A door slams in the distance. Snape turns his head briefly to the side, and in the time it takes him to find her with his eyes again she has raised her wand hand to the level of his throat.

"I will compel _you_, if necessary." She steps away from the statue, without lowering her wand. "But I'm certain that would increase our chances of capture."

He watches her a long moment. Then, expelling a long breath, he walks to the statue, climbs over the pedestal, and lowers himself through the opening. She waits until she hears the impact of his feet on the ground below, then climbs up after him, pulling the hump of the statue down over her head.

She is disoriented in the darkness until the end of a lighted wand ignites before her. Snape is moving forward, the light stretched ahead of him. "_Lumos_," she whispers, and follows.

The passageway is frigid, and stretches before them for what seems like miles. Luna can see her breath as a white mist in the air whenever she exhales. The whole world has contracted to what she can see in the light at the end of their wands, the sway of Snape's long robes, the reflection of the fire against his hair.

She becomes wearier with every step, her legs and arms sluggish. At length she stumbles over the hem of her skirt, and catches herself against the pebbled stone wall of the passage.

Snape turns and, wordlessly, helps her up. He does not remove his hand from her back, even after she regains her footing. Thereafter they walk the passage side by side.

She does not know they have reached the end until Snape halts. She has been studying the ground beneath their feet, the small stones that scatter before their shoes. She watches as he points his wand at the small trapdoor over their head, and mutters, "_Reveal_."

Before her eyes the wooden rectangle shimmers, and becomes transparent. Beyond it, she can see a room, littered with empty, overturned boxes. It appears deserted.

She jerks, startled, as beside her Snape begins to laugh, low and quiet. She looks at him, as he continues to stare through the trap door.

"Honeydukes." He looks at her sidelong, then looks away, still laughing. "What are the time honored edicts and regulations of the greatest school in Britain compared to this?"

Luna can't help but feel that this is a highly inopportune moment for Snape to develop a sense of humor. "Can't we Apparate from here?"

"I wouldn't care to risk it. Jinxes as strong as those tend to fill the space between barriers." He traces the gap between the door and the aperture with a long finger. "Hogsmeade is occupied. We shall have to mind our step."

He opens the door, and climbs the steps. She waits, holding her breath, until he turns back and nods. Then she climbs up after him.

"To Grimmauld Place," he says, standing amongst the wreckage of the bare cellar, and then he is gone with a sharp crack.

She pictures the room in which they drank tea that morning, when the world was a different place. Then she follows.

Their tea things are still on the table in the parlor when she Apparates into Grimmauld Place seconds later. The white Death Eater's mask Snape had worn when she first saw him hours ago lies on the floor near the armchair. She looks at it now and cannot remember what impelled her to touch it then. She watches it now as though it were a snake, coiled to strike.

Snape is standing at the window, looking outside. "You haven't slept yet. There are beds upstairs. I believe you will find fresh linen in the cupboard."

Luna stares at the back of his head, unable to think of how she should reply. Anything she could force past the censorship of her teeth and tongue would be inadequate.

She is saved from all comment, however, when footsteps on the staircase distract them both. Neither of them have put their wands away yet, and they raise them in unison as a tall, thin figure in brown robes turns the corner into the parlor.

"Luna." Lupin glances from Luna to Snape and back again, and smiles. "Well done."

"Lupin." Snape lowers his wand, but does not put it away. He looks at Lupin as though he has something urgent to say, but he checks himself. He too glances at Luna, who suddenly feels like a child who has strayed into the adult's conversation and must be put to bed before matters of importance can be concluded.

"Hermione?" she says to Lupin, partly out of concern, and partly to show Snape that he, too, is ignorant in some matters.

"She's upstairs, resting. She'll be fine." Lupin speaks in the same careful, polite tone he used when offering her tea and inquiring after her dead father. "How are you? That gash looks nasty."

Luna touches the patch of dried blood at her temple. Snape jerks and looks at her as though noticing her face for the first time. It occurs to Luna that in the last months he has probably become more accustomed to seeing people bloody and injured than not. "I feel fine, but I should wash. Where is Hermione staying?"

"First door past the washroom. I believe she's sleeping now, but there's another bed there, already turned down."

Luna nods. She looks at Snape, who has turned his back to her again, and mounts the stairs with heavy, silent steps. When she is halfway up she stops, and flattening herself to the wall, turns to listen. the wards?"

Lupin's voice is too low to hear. There is one word which sounds like "Aurelia," which she knows to be Professor Vector's given name, and another that sounds like "Flitwick."

"...Honoria Sprout," she hears Snape say. "...Malfoy, Rosier...Lestrange."

Her vision becomes blurred then, and she throws a hand against the wall to steady herself. Her head is aching, and for the first time she is aware that the cut over her eye is stinging, throbbing in time with her pulse. Still steadying herself against the wall, she turns and climbs the stairs to the landing.

She walks to the loo, then turns and stands in the doorway. From this perspective the upper floor of Grimmauld Place is similar to her house in Ottery St. Catchpole. She stares in the direction of the staircase, waiting for the fat man in mask and robes to come thundering into view. This time she will not waste time stunning him. She will use the curse Hermione taught the D.A. two years ago, the one the nearly killed her when she dueled Antonin Dolohov at the Department of Mysteries. A flick of Luna's wand, and she can slash his throat. A simple incantation, and she sever his heart from its moorings within his breast.

She steps inside the loo and faces the mirror. In the dim light she looks like the Bloody Baron, ghastly and only half alive. This makes her think of the Grey Lady, who failed her. She wonders what has happened to the ghosts now that Hogwarts is taken. Would they stay? Would the Death Eaters destroy them? Would they come to the Death Eaters in the night when they were unable to sleep, and speak to them of times past, before they were murderers?

She pours water from the jug into the wash basin, and when she cannot find a cloth she moistens the hem of her white sleeve. She scrubs at the dried blood over her eye, and continues to rub when the cut begins to sting and bleed again. The pain is concrete; she holds on to it, scrubbing harder as the sensation of being again within her body begins to dull the screams mounting in her throat.

A moment later she realizes that she is crying. She lowers her arm, and a fresh trickle of blood runs down the side of her face. She sits on the edge of the tub and folds her arms over her stomach.

"Luna?" 

She lifts her head, and though her eyes are swollen she can see Hermione, thin and pale, standing in the doorway, supporting herself against the frame. There are dark bruises down the left side of her face, and one of her eyes is swollen shut.

Luna stands, unsteadily, and takes a step toward her. Hermione holds her arms out at the same time, and Luna lets herself be embraced. She leans her head against Hermione's shoulder, though she knows she is staining the other girls' robes with tears and blood.

When she has cried until she is barely able to stand, Hermione puts an arm around her waist, and slowly, Hermione limping, they help each other across the landing to the bedroom, where the promise of a bed fills Luna with so much relief that she wants to cry again. Only after she and Hermione are both underneath covers, shivering and silent, does Luna realize that at the foot of the stairs a tall figure in black robes had watched them as they passed, as though observing some sacred rite he dare not intrude upon.


	8. chapter eight

8.

"Do not waste my time, Lupin. The wards were compromised from within. I am not asking you to confirm; it is clear enough. I am merely asking which members of staff you were looking at before the attack came." 

Snape's hands are trembling though he has concealed them far enough beneath his robes to hide the fact from Lupin. He is not concealing his emotions with equal success. Strange, that with everything he has seen, his defenses are so undone by the breaching of the castle. _Merely a building, a construction of wood and stone,_ he tells himself, knowing it for a lie.

"We monitored everyone, Severus. Even you and I were watched. Even Dumbledore was asked to account for himself." Lupin stops, and sighs heavily.

"Lupin." His voice is not quite a growl. "Remember to whom you are speaking."

"Aurelia Vector did not make contact with her liaison last night. I feared her taken, but she was present at the meeting this morning. She intentionally avoided me, and as I was leaving the castle I saw her standing over Filius Flitwick. He was dead, and when she saw me, she ran."

Snape stops pacing and positions himself again before the window, watching Lupin's reflection in the glass. When Lupin turns his back, Snape grants himself the momentary indulgence of resting his head in both hands, and closing his eyes. He has recovered by the time Lupin has turned his direction again. 

"Naturally, there be may be any number of explanations for her behavior...."

"However many plausible explanations you could devise, there are double that number of reasons to believe the worst." A child from a neighboring brownstone comes running into view, in pursuit of a small black and white ball. Snape steps away from the window and takes a heavy seat in the armchair.

"She was your pupil. Would you give up on her so willingly?"

"She had....pressures to contend with that nothing, even the threat of my displeasure, could effectively counterbalance." He studies his hands. "The weight of her blood was a considerable burden to her."

"No less than yours was to you," Lupin observes, his voice mild. 

"Comparisons are odious. Aurelia remained in contact with her brother long after becoming estranged from the rest of her family. Dolohov has been courting her intensely." Snape stands up, and begins to pace. "She hasn't left the castle for months." 

"Whereas you cut off all connection with your family when you were sixteen."

"And still made regrettable choices. So you see, there are no reliable predictors of behavior." 

"Agreed. I am still not prepared to call her a traitor until we know more. Did you observe anything of note on your way out?"

"The safeguards over Longbottom held. He was gone before we were. Malfoy's band had taken the ground floor; Rosier, Rodolphus Lestrange, that lot were all with him." He pauses, because it seems necessary. "Honoria Sprout is dead." 

A movement at the top of the stair catches his eye; Hermione Granger, hobbling past in her dressing gown, her arm around a disheveled, luminous figure in white. He realizes with a start that this is Luna, seeming suddenly ten years older than she did half an hour ago.

He feels a sudden pang of guilt, a feeling he is coming to associate with the girl. He finds this troubling, but Lupin's voice calls his attention back to the parlor before he can begin to dwell on it.

"I believe that most of the Order Apparated away directly after the meeting. Dumbledore, I know, left to check on Harry. Hermione and I only remained behind because Hermione was concerned for Luna."

Snape turns his back on the stair. "Then we must assume that the attack on the school is unknown save to those of us who escaped. We should alert the Burrow, the safehouses. Dumbledore as well, though chances are excellent he already knows."

"Hermione and Luna need time to rest."

Snape arches an eyebrow, and welcomes the first uncomplicated emotion he has felt for days. "I fail to see how that bears on the situation."

"Do you intend to leave Luna here alone?"

"She is hardly my responsibility."

"No more would I describe Hermione as my responsibility, but I have no intention of leaving her here injured and unguarded."

"Your relationship with Miss Granger is not one that bears speculation." 

For only the second time in the thirty odd years of their acquaintance, there is a flash of something dangerous in Lupin's gaze. He opens his mouth, but the next voice to speak is not his. 

"Indeed, Professor Snape, I think we can all agree that speculations into affairs that don't concern us inevitably prove tiresome to everyone involved." Hermione emerges from the staircase, one hand cinching her dressing gown, the other gripping the bannister.

"Should you be up, Hermione?" Lupin moves toward her, but she waves him off and sits in the armchair Snape vacated a few minutes ago.

"I couldn't help but overhear your gallant defense of me, Remus, and though I do appreciate it, I agree with Professor Snape. I'm not fit to move yet, and poor Luna is so tired that she's hysterical. We'll be perfectly safe here while you warn the others. Once we're useful again we can make our way to the Burrow."

Snape offers her a smile, and a small, ironic bow. "An excellent notion, Miss Granger. If you will excuse me."

He leaves the room without waiting for Lupin to offer further protest. He heads, not for the Apparition parlor, but for the kitchens, where less than twelve hours ago, and in another world, he made tea for a bewildering girl and tried to come to terms with the radical new shape of his destiny.

It is no wonder if he lacks something in self-awareness, he muses, when the events that provoke self-examination so rarely afford the opportunity to conduct it at leisure.

He rifles the herboire and, conjuring a pen and parchment, scrawls several lines of writing he knows full well is legible only to him. Leaving the cupboard doors open and vials strewn over the counter, he turns back for the parlor, parchment in hand.

Halfway down the hall, he stops. Through the parlor door, which stands wide open, he can see Lupin and Granger, embracing. He halts, unable to look away, despite the roil of disgust in his gut.

His earlier comment to Lupin notwithstanding, he had not actually supposed the two of them were....intimate. A blushing, half-secret schoolboy's infatuation seems more Lupin's style, especially when the subject of his infatuation is someone as brazen as Granger.

An interminable period of time seems to pass until Lupin steps back, kisses her cheek, and Apparates. Snape shuts his eyes and tries to rid his mind of the image, uttering a silent prayer of thanks to whatever semi-merciful deity allowed him to witness the scene but spared him the agony of walking in on it blindly.

Hermione turns in the next moment and sees him standing outside the door. She smiles, her lips thin. "And here we were just discussing the infelicity of prying into other people's affairs."

"Whatever knowledge I have of your private affairs, or of Lupin's, I owe entirely to a series of unhappy accidents." He steps from the hallway, into the parlor, shutting it behind him pointedly. "Luckily, there are potions one can take for the nausea."

"May I ask you something?" She plows ahead without waiting for the requested permission. "What is it about us, precisely, that so often causes the petulant third year in you to surface?"

Snape arches an eyebrow, hoping that the flush he can feel gathering around his collar hasn't crept into any of the visible areas of his head and neck, "_Us_, Miss Granger?"

"Harry's friends. Ron and I, Ginny, Lupin, Sirius, when he was alive—not to mention Harry himself. Now that you can't humiliate us during Potions anymore, you make a point of inserting nasty and useless remarks into perfectly civil conversations. Why must you make things so difficult?"

Snape lifts his chin. It's an easy way to avoid looking directly into her eyes. "I hold nothing against any of your little school friends, Potter included, that I do not hold against all selfish, undisciplined, disrespectful children—" 

"Oh, would you just stop it!" Hermione shouts at him. She seems to take herself by as much surprise as she has taken Snape; she runs a hand over her face, and when she speaks again her voice is much calmer. "Really, Professor, isn't it about time you came up with a new story? That one ceased to be remotely convincing when we were in sixth year. We aren't children anymore. And this still doesn't begin to explain your hostility toward Remus." 

Snape studies her a moment before answering, despite the fact that, with this question, he is on much firmer ground than before. "In the normal course of events, I am perfectly ambivalent toward Remus Lupin. He lacks distinctive flaws as well as distinctive virtues, and so he is of no interest to me.

"When I observe, however, that he has chosen to abandon his normal measure of relative good sense and conduct an—affair, with his own student...." Snape's nostrils flare delicately. "My feelings shift rather dramatically to the left of ambivalence." 

"Actually, I'm sure you haven't forgotten that Remus is no longer a teacher, or that he has you to thank for that fact. More to the point, I left Hogwarts two years ago. If that is the basis for your disapproval, I'd say you're reaching."

There are bright spots of color over her cheekbones, hectic against the pallor her skin, and she is breathing somewhat more heavily than normal. Because, he tells himself, he does not have time to attend her in a swooning fit, he takes a careful seat on the edge of a silk armchair and leans forward. After a moment of watching him suspiciously, Hermione also sits, and waits.

"All I know is this, Miss Granger. We are at war. Precision is demanded of each of us who fight the enemy, and high emotion is a deadly threat to precision. And when there is a significant age difference....between lovers....there are inevitably complications which....increase that threat."

Now he is certain that the blush has crept above his collar, but Hermione has begun looking at him with less anger and something more like interest.

"You sound as though you're speaking from experience."

For the second time in the space of an hour he pushes thoughts of Aurelia Vector from his mind. "It is a common scenario."

He stands up, unfolds the piece of parchment he has held crumpled in his hand throughout the conversation, and offers it to her. She takes it, and looking at him with a furrowed brow, begins to study it.

"If you follow those instructions precisely, the mixture will, I believe, go far to restoring you and Miss Lovegood to a state of relative health. All the ingredients can be found in the kitchens." He smiles tightly. "I understand it may be some time before you feel up to it, but I would strongly encourage that you see to it yourself. Miss Lovegood lacks your careful hand with potions."

"I see." She looks up at him, and nods. "That is very kind of you."

"Not at all. Now if you will excuse me, it is past time I was gone."

He walks to the Apparition parlor, because he does not like to Apparate in front of other people unless it is necessary. A moment later he is hundreds of miles away.


	9. chapter nine

9.

The violent shove which sends him flying against the nearest wall comes as no surprise. Neither does the wand tip pressing against the large vein of his throat, or the stench of goat in his nostrils.

"Hello, Moody," he says, recognizing him even in the shadows. He smiles with genuine pleasure, knowing Moody will see it and be irritated. 

"What are you doing here, Snape?" Moody's luminous blue eye is just visible in the half light. He does not slacken his grip.

"A pleasure to see you as well, Moody. I trust your holiday with Potter has done you good?"

Moody snorts, and then he does takes a step back, lowering his wand. "Right. Holiday. Very clever." He sheathes his wand. "What's your business, then?"

"I need to see Dumbledore."

"Why?"

"Hogwarts is taken. An untold number of the Order are dead or captured." It is a mark of his exhaustion that he nearly spits the words into Moody's face.

He cannot read the other man's expression, but there is a long pause before he replies, as though the news is not unexpected.

"Dumbledore can't see you."

"And why is that?"

"He's dying."

There is no reason Snape should feel shocked. But all the air leaves his lungs, and the only bodily sensation he is aware of is a faint prickling up and down his arms.

Moody continues. "He collapsed an hour ago. Hasn't moved since. Knew you were coming, though. Keeps asking for you."

"Why then...." Snape clears his throat in an effort to keep his voice from shaking. "Why can I not see him?"

"Poppy's shut herself away with him. Trying every trick in the book and writing a few of her own."

"But you have no hope?"

Moody looks away. "All you have to do is look at him."

Snape continues to stand with his back against the wall. Moody takes a few steps toward the door, then stops, leaning against the lintel. He speaks without turning around. "Come with me. I'll take care of Poppy."

Snape sheathes his own wand with a hand whose shaking he no longer tries to hide. He follows Moody outside, raising an arm to shield his eyes from the light.

The shack, the whole compound, sits on top of a mountain. When he steps out the door his feet strike rock and dirt and grass. Despite himself—despite everything—he is forced to be still and notice the world around him. From where they stand, there is nothing to see save an oasis of blue trees canopied by violet mist. The air smells of fresh rain and heavy magics.

From the perspective of scenery, he can't imagine a better place to die.

Moody begins to walk down a steep path carved into the mountain. Despite his wooden leg he outdistances Snape easily, leaping from rock to rock while Snape slips and missteps, falling twice. When the crude wooden steps run out, Snape foregoes all pretense of dignity and slides the remaining distance on the side of his foot. Once at the bottom of the hill Moody offers a hand up that Snape does not refuse.

Moody leads him from the path to the door of another shack, identical to the last save for the garden—there are neat lines of every healing herb Snape knows of, as well as several he doesn't recognize.

When Moody knocks, the voice that answers is so strained that it is barely recognizable as Poppy Pomfrey's. "There's been no change. I will call you if you are needed."

Moody opens the door just wide enough to fit his head through. "Snape's just come, Poppy. I think Dumbledore'll want to see him."

He takes a hasty step back as the door is flung open and Madam Pomfrey stares down on them both. Her neat cap and apron are gone; she wears a set of patched grey robes, wild tendrils of white hair haloing her face. 

"What he wants is immaterial. He is my patient, and he's weak enough as it is—I won't have you upsetting him with Merlin knows what kind of horrible news—"

"I am well enough to see my friends, Poppy." The quiet voice from within the little house should have been barely audible, but it silences them all in an instant.

Pomfrey closes her eyes, and the slump of her shoulders speaks of capitulation. Wordlessly, she stands aside. Moody takes her by the arm and begins leading her toward a small oak grove, where seven trees form a semi-circle around a group of smooth white sitting stones.

Snape enters the cottage, fighting the urge to close his eyes. He does not want to see Dumbledore frail, dying. Like a child, he retains the irrational surety that the worst cannot be true, so long as he does not have to face the proof of it.

He looks toward the bed in the corner of the room, and in the same instant bites his tongue, afraid what he will say if he lets himself speak. It takes all the strength in his body to approach the bed and the still form beneath the blankets. 

"Severus." A faint stirring follows the sound of the voice, and on the table in the middle of the room a candle begins to glow.

Dumbledore face, sunken and weary, is softened by the light. His eyes are closed, and when he speaks, his mouth barely moves. "I am glad to see you."

"You should have told us you took the Guardian Potion." He knows they are useless, but the words are out of his mouth before he can stop them. 

"To what end?" Thin lips form a smile. "You could not have been any more vigilant than you were."

"There were preparations we could have made. You are secret keeper for half the Order's safehouses, we—" The knot in his throat forces him to stop. "You should have told us."

"How many were taken with the castle?"

Snape delays his answering by looking to the left and right of him for a chair. None are to be found, so he conjures one for himself and draws it up to the bed, sitting. "There is no way of knowing."

"What do you know?"

"Lupin, Granger, the Lovegood girl—we were the only ones to have made it to Grimmauld Place by the time I came here. The others may have gone to the Burrow, I cannot be sure. Lupin is there now to alert them."

Dumbledore's eyes flicker open. The are bright and clear, even in the half light. "Miss Granger—Miss Lovegood?"

"Both injured. They remained in London."

Dumbledore's chin dips a fraction of an inch, the tiniest of nods. They sit in silence for the next minute.

"Neville Longbottom...." Dumbledore seems to lose all air in the effort of pronouncing the name. "He arrived here, with his caretakers, a few minutes before you. He is very weak."

"You know that I have never been so convinced of his importance as the rest of you."

"You have never had faith....in the sometime divinity of madness." Dumbledore smiles, and Snape has to look away.

"Listen to me, Severus. I have little time remaining. The more fully Voldemort's supporters take possession of the castle, the further I will slip from you. I must have a promise from you before you go. Will you give it to me?"

There is nothing he can say, no resistance he can offer to the weight of a dying request. "In twenty years," he says, "I have refused you nothing." 

"Yes, that is true. There is....such faithfulness in you." Dumbledore closes his eyes again and draws a long, rattling breath. "I want you to promise me that you will believe Neville. Whatever he may tell you. Whatever he may say. However....incredible, or offensive it may seem." 

"Headmaster." Snape can feel heat rising in his face.

"I will have your promise, Severus. You must trust that I would not ask this lightly."

"He would no sooner confide in me than I would invite a confidence from him. You should ask this of anyone but me." _You should ask of me anything but this_, he does not say.

"It cannot be anyone but you, for reasons that will become clear. Now...will you give me your word?"

Snape's fist tightens in his lap. He knows the walls are closing in, but he tries one more time. "I will have no opportunity to care for a child, much less an invalid, in the coming days. That, you must grant me."

"I do not ask you to assume guardianship of Neville. He will remain here, for the time being. I want no more, no less than I have asked of you." Dumbledore smiles again. "I only want you....to have faith in him."

Snape jumps as the door swings open, hinges complaining. Pomfrey stands there, grasping a bunch of athelas in her left hand, her mouth set in a thin line.

"Severus?" Dumbledore's voice holds him.

Snape rises, lifting his head and closing his eyes. "In this, as in all things, I am your servant."

Dumbledore does not move, but contentment plays at the corners of his lips. "No, dear boy. Never that." 

It is as much of a dying benediction as Snape can endure. He brushes past Pomfrey on his way through the door and stands in the sunlight a moment, searching for breath.

He does not have the energy to insult Moody by moving away as he approaches. He keeps his seat on the white boulder and looks carefully at nothing.

"There's some things we need to go over before you head off again." Moody arranges himself on one of the stones nearby, and rests his staff across his lap. "First off, we found Leopold Lovegood's body a few hours ago. Been dead awhile so far as we can tell, but they had their fun with him first. Though I don't see as we need to tell the lass that."

"I agree. What else?"

"Priscilla Proctor's MLES division responded to a call near the Lovegood place early this morning. Your old crowd. Caught the merrymakers in the act and ambushed 'em, neat as you please. Five dead, two captured." Moody pauses. "Mulciber's one of the two."

Now Snape does look at Moody. The implication of his words is not slow to sink in, but Snape is determined not to understand him. "You want me to go back." 

"Don't want you to do anything. Just thought you should have all the facts."

"Mulciber's capture means nothing." Snape's fingers dig into the rock, white knuckled. "Crabbe was there as well."

"Thought you said Luna hexed him."

"He has already come to doubt me. I fled when the school was taken. If I present myself to him now, it will be the end. He will turn my mind like the pages of a book." 

"You telling me you never lied your way out of a sticky spot before?"

"This," Snape breathes, "hardly qualifies as 'sticky'."

Moody shrugs, and, taking his staff in hand, gets to his feet again. "Like I said. Just thought you should be in possession of the facts." He tips the bowler hat over one eye. "Heading back directly?"

Snape gets to his feet as well, and though it is on the tip of his tongue to say yes, he does not. "I've one more errand to complete before I go." He smiles, and the feeling is unpleasant. "I need to see Neville Longbottom."

He follows Moody back up the steep path to the large building that houses the majority of the compound. Both of them are out of breath by the time they reach the top, and Snape's fingernails are black with dirt, his palms smeared green with grass and dented with the impression of sharp, tiny pebbles.

"Forgot to mention, going down's the easy part," Moody grins.

"I'm sure." Snape dusts his hands against his robes and pushes his hair back from his face. Only then does it occur to him that he could have simply Apparated.

He watches as Moody walks to the door and removes his wand. He wields it like a pen, tracing the figures of runes and numbers in blue light across the doorframe. They glow brilliantly for a moment, then fade, though it seems to Snape that he can still see a faint impression of them upon the air.

Moody turns the latch and pushes the door open, then steps back. "I should stay near Dumbledore in case Poppy needs me for something. Neville's last door at the end of the hall."

Snape arches an eyebrow. "The room is not warded?"

"All you'll need is your wand. Nothing fancy. Chief reason for locking him up at school was to keep other people from wandering in on him, much good as that did. We've still got his wand."

"I see. Thank you." Snape starts for the door, and Moody takes a few steps away before stopping, and half turning back in Snape's direction.

Snape pauses, and waits. His mind races ahead, trying to anticipate what Moody will say to him. It is the way he handles hostile conversations, the few seconds' advantage enabling him to choose his reply with care.

"Don't go out of your way to upset the boy."

The corner of Snape's mouth spasms involuntarily. "I'm sure I don't know what you mean."

"Dragondung. He gets on your nerves. Gets on mine too, truth to tell. Still." Moody turns back, and his next words are nearly lost in the wind. "All of here's got sorrows enough."

Snape turns his back and walks into the house, his footsteps echoing hollow against the bare wooden floor.

He bypasses the staircase and walks down the corridor, into the flood of light from the wide window open at the end of the hall. There are doors to the left and right, most closed, some open, revealing neat, spartan bedchambers and cold fireplaces. All are silent as the dead, except for the last door on the right; he can hear rhythmic pacing, objects beings picked up and set down again.

He lifts his wand, preparing to open the door without warning. But he remembers Moody's words, and, repressing a sigh, knocks.

"What?" There is the sound of breaking glass, and Snape, unable to control himself, rolls his eyes. "Who—what—who's there, what do you want?"

_You promised the Headmaster you would believe him,_ Snape thinks to himself. _And I do. I believe him mad._

He taps the door once with his wand, there comes the sound of a latch releasing. The door opens slowly of its own volition, hinges whinnying in high pitched complaint.

"_You_."

Though Neville is staring, an expression of loathing and fear twisting his features, Snape must recover from his own surprise before stepping into the room and closing the door behind him. He has not seen the boy since the battle six months ago, and the change is....dramatic. 

"I never wanted to see you again." Neville is hoarse. He is backed against a bureau, his skeletal fingers buckling as they attempt to dig into the wood.

"I am hardly here for my own amusement, Longbottom." The sneer is twisting his lips before he can reconsider it.

The sound of Neville's scream, high and anguished, has him taking a step back even before he realizes that the boy is running towards him, claw-like fingers reaching for his throat. A year ago the impact would have been more substantial; as it is, Snape barely staggers as the wasted body hurls into him. Nonetheless, the strength of his hands is something more than Snape would have predicted. He can feel bruises forming as Neville's fingers close around his neck, thumbs digging into his windpipe.

Snape drops his wand before he can give in to temptation. He grabs the boy's wrists and pries them away, then shoves him backwards. Neville stumbles, then throws himself forward again, sobbing and snarling. Snape meets him in mid-stride, seizing his shoulder and using the leverage to spin him so that he is facing away. He then hooks one arm around his neck and the other around the waist. Neville's fingernails carved bloody crescents into his flesh before he manages to throw the boy onto his bed.

Panting, he finds his wand and immobilizes the writhing creature before he can recover and attack yet again.

Snape drops into an armchair beside the bed, and looks at Neville, who stares up with wide eyes. He drags the cuff of a sleeve over his brow, and sheathes his wand. 

"That," he says, "is why wizards do not generally indulge themselves in fisticuffs. However cathartic they may be, wands are simply more effective."

"If you hurt me," says Neville, teeth chattering, "the others will find out."

"Really? I hear no one coming, despite your vigorous attempts to injure me."

"I knew it." Neville's eyes are hot, his gaze unsteady. "I always knew you were trying to destroy me."

"If I wanted to 'destroy' you, I could have done so a hundred times already, and at far greater convenience to myself. I am here now at the Headmaster's behest, and for no other reason." Snape permits himself a smile. "Though I am not sorry I came—I wouldn't have missed that display for the world."

Trembling, Neville stops trying to break the invisible bonds tying him to the bed. He slumps back, tears rolling over the swell of his too-prominent cheekbones.

"Tell me, Longbottom. Why are you here?" Snape leans back in his seat, his hands folded in his lap. He does not trust himself to move from the chair, not while his blood is still hot with the remembered pleasures of breaking a pathetic creature while it struggles. "What makes you so extraordinary that all the maneuverings of this resistance have come to be based on the pictures in your brain?" 

"Go away." Neville rolls his head to the side, facing away from Snape. "I hate you. You took her away." 

Snape feels his body still itself, as though, subconsciously, he has scented some near danger. "What are you talking about?" 

"She was so beautiful. I hadn't seen her for so long, and then she came to me, and you took her away. You made her forget me." His voice is muffled as he buries his face in the bedclothes.

"You're blithering," Snape says, though there is a familiar twisting in his gut.

"I see her every night. In the sky. She burns white, she carries the dead. Like the moon." His voice grows weaker. "It's in that room. Behind the locked door."

The restraining charm, cast weakly, is wearing off. Neville pushes himself upright with obvious effort, moving with slow, exaggerated gestures, as though under water. "They've stolen the moon. They've got it locked up." 

None of the responses that come to him in the first minute make it past his lips. At last he sets aside the need to cull logic from the boy's soliloquy, and says the only thing that seems fitting. "Where?"

Neville blinks twice, and looks at Snape the way Snape so often looked at him, as though he had just added twice the amount of leech juice needed for a Shrinking Solution. "You know where. In the Department of Mysteries."

_I want you to promise me that you will believe Neville. Whatever he may tell you. However....incredible it may seem._

Snape rises, and stares down at Neville, who stares back, his eyes red, shadows beneath them that were not present when Snape first entered the room. "You don't believe me."

Snape pulls his wand from the sheathe in his boot, and frees Neville from the remnants of his restraining charm. He does not do it for Neville's benefit.

He turns on his heel and sweeps from the room, throwing the door shut behind him. The glass in the window panes rattle with the force of the slam, and the walls seem to vibrate with weight of his steps. 

He leaves by the first door he comes to, which is not the door he entered by. The view is entirely different from here, and he leans against the wall a minute, listening as a hawk flies, screaming, overhead.

There is a lake in the distance, and three figures walking along the shore, pushing a boat into the water. One of them falls into the water, and the tallest doubles over at the waist. He can just make out the sound of laughter, carried on the wind.

He pushes Potter from his mind, because there is no room for disdain amidst everything else. He follows a plain dirt path leading to the front of the house, until the sound of laughter is lost in the sound of the wind in the trees.

He Apparates to the foot of the downhill path, and finds Moody seated by the oak grove. Poppy Pomfrey sits beside him, sobbing into her hands.

Moody looks up, and for the first time since Snape has known him there is uncertainty in his face. "Get out of here, Snape," he growls, getting to his feet. "Go and warn them."

Snape closes his eyes. Heat is spreading all throughout his body, searing his throat and eyes, restricting his breath. The hand at his side curls into a fist. There is strength there still. It is good to be reminded.

"Go!"

He pulls his wand from his sleeve, and Disapparates.


	10. chapter ten

10.

The first face he sees when arrives at Grimmauld Place is Aurelia Vector's.

In that moment, he is a soldier. No conscious thought enters his mind. His wand, already in hand, is instantly at her throat, and before she has so much as opened her mouth to speak, she is bound, neck to ankle, in rope.

He stands there, breath returning slowly, calmed by the sight of her immobilized. She looks at him with unfathomable eyes.

"Professor." 

Fear strikes him for the first time as he realizes that the voice is close to his ear and he has not yet seen the speaker. He spins to face her, but even after he recognizes Luna it takes a deliberate effort to lower his wand.

"You're awake." It is the adrenaline, he tells himself, that reduces him to making such obvious statements.

"Yes," she says, no chastisement in her voice. "So is Hermione. Or she was, when she left. She's at the Burrow now. She might have gone to sleep again there."

Snape blinks. He his sure that he has only heard one of every three words she has said, but somehow the mere sound of her voice soothes him.

"When did she," he jerks his head back in Aurelia's direction, "arrive?"

"Not long ago. Just after Hermione left. She was looking for you." 

Exhaustion overtakes him suddenly, as though a door long shut that has been thrown wide. He reaches for the arm of the nearest chair and lowers himself into it, gripping his wand, looking at the floor.

After a few seconds he looks back up at Luna. "Miss Lovegood. If you would oblige me, I should like to spend some time alone with Professor Vector."

She nods. It is a gracious gesture, as though it pleases her to do him a favor. She glides from the room, and turns for the staircase.

When he is certain she is out of earshot, he stands facing Aurelia. Maintaining eye contact, he raises his wand, mutters the summoning charm, and opens his right hand. Two small vials materialize there; one is filled with clear potion, the consistency of water, and the other is a shimmering blue. He slips the blue vial into his pocket. The clear vial he uncorks. 

He must be quick. Dumbledore is dead; the Fidelius Charm is unraveling even now, and the house is no longer secure. But there is time enough for this.

Wordlessly, he crosses the distance between himself and the bound woman. He sheathes his wand long enough to grip her jaw in his free hand and wrench it so that she is forced to open her mouth, crying out in pain. With the other hand he tips the vial and pours an inch's worth of the potion into her mouth. He quells the vindictive urge to make her swallow the entire vial; there will be other uses for the rest of the potion, and an overdose will make her babble unintelligently.

He knows that if she meant him harm he would already be dead. She is skilled, more skilled than he, at wandless magic, and in the moments between sheathing his wand and giving her the potion she could have freed herself and repelled him, long enough at least to reclaim her wand.

Knowing this, he hurts her still, because she has caused him suffering, both nine years ago and in the last two hours. He does not allow himself to wonder which injuries, past or present, motivate him more.

He stands over her as she chokes on the liquid, and does not return to his chair until her eyes have begun to glaze. When saliva begins to bubble at the corner of her mouth, he asks the first question.

"Did you break the castle wards?"

"No." She says it without hesitation, but the relief of exoneration is not in her voice.

"Did you provide any Death Eater with the means to break the castle wards?"

She opens her mouth, then closes it. A sheen of perspiration appears on her brow; she is fighting the serum. "Not...intentionally."

His fingers tighten on the arm of the chair. "Explain."

"My brother asked to see me."

"When?" All the Hogwarts fires have been monitored for the last four years, and no owl has reached the school in the last month.

"We have mirrors."

Anger, irritation, rise hot in his throat. They should have known this. Two-way mirrors are more dangerous than either fires or owls. "How did you admit him?"

"I...." She coughs, violently, and after a moment begins to gasp for air. When Snape makes no move to help her, she struggles to regain speech. "I never intended...." Her eyes close, and the despair in her voice rises with the pitch. "Severus, there are many truths!"

He keeps his gaze steady, and forbids expression in his voice. "Start with the simplest, then." 

"The simplest?" She shakes her head, and strands of dark hair fall across the white brow, into the brightness of her black eyes. "I love my brother."

"Then tell me what you did for him."

"I disabled the wards....on my fire. I thought the monitors would see him. I thought....they would arrest him, as soon as he entered the castle. I meant to trap him." She closes her eyes, and tears escape the pressure the lids. "I love my brother. I wanted him in prison, where he could not be killed. Where he could not kill anyone else."

Unbidden, Snape sees Dolohov laughing, doubly familiar features glowing with the pleasures of the hunt, the kill. A dull pain begins to throb behind his eyes, a white light that pulses as though signaling some danger.

She is the last living person with whom he has ever shared intimacy, and in memory of it he permits himself the luxury of resting his head against the heel of his hand. "What went wrong?"

"Everything." Her laugh is brittle, tinged with hysteria. "I did not smother him in his cradle when we were children. I did not throw myself from the North Tower once it became clear that he had no intention of releasing me. A daughter of the blood."

"Aurelia." He can afford to be gentle for one moment. "Explain to me how he corrupted the wards."

"I let him in. I admitted him to my chamber. I took precautions, but Antonin anticipated them all. The moment I dropped my wards, he came through. With others. They overpowered me. Even Antonin helped them subdue me. It was over before I could do anything." She is weeping now, openly, childishly—from what he knows of her, for the first time since she was in swaddling clothes.

He gets to his feet, and looks down on her. Too tired to refuse the thought, it occurs to him that they have shared a truer intimacy in this than ever existed between them as lovers.

He turns his back on her, and walks toward the parlor door.

"Forgive me, Severus." Her voice, too weary for passion. Is merely pleading.

He pauses a moment, listening. Then he walks out into the corridor, and does not look back.

He goes to the kitchen because he believes that Luna is upstairs. Instead, he finds her seated at the kitchen table, fingers curled without tension around a cup of tea. There is a teapot and two more cups, empty, on the table before her. She looks up as he enters, smiles.

It is a fitting time for confessions, he decides, and sits in the only other chair at the table, beside her. She does not acknowledge the heaviness with which he takes his seat, except to pour tea into one of the empty cups and hand it to him. The parallel with the morning's tableau does not escape him.

"Luna," he says, and wonders for a moment when she became 'Luna' to him.

"I never studied Arithmancy, but Hermione did. She seemed to like Professor Vector very much."

He shuts his eyes hard, and holds the tea cup without drinking, brittle fingers absorbing the warmth. 

"Dumbledore is dead," he says, because he can think of no appropriate preamble, and because he needs to hear aloud the words no one has yet spoken.

She says nothing, and when he opens his eyes again he is startled to find her gazing at him, her face expressionless except for a faint crinkling at the corner of her eyes. A day ago he would never have noticed it. Now he recognizes it for concern.

It makes the next words harder. "Your father is dead." Now the eyes upon him are sharper, brighter. "A Magical Law Enforcement hit squad arrived at your house shortly after you and I escaped. Seven of the nine Death Eaters there were taken or killed." He hesitates. "There is evidence that he—your father—died quickly."

"Relatively speaking." 

There is only one reason why Proctor's understaffed squad of exhausted, marginally competent Aurors were able to rout a circle of Nine so successfully. They had been apprehended in the midst of their bacchanal, sluggish and stupid after a sustained frenzy. Moody had not said so, but he did not have to.

"Yes," he says. He has lied to her on this score once, but not twice.

"I knew he was dead," she says, eyes focused on nothing, as though the words are a matter for great concentration. "I had dreams...." She blinks, and her eyes regain focus.

A moment later he realizes that their focus is on him. "What will this mean for you?"

For some reason, the simple question, the calm blue eyes, make him acknowledge for the first time the true depth of his weariness, which is so deep that his body has ceased to call it weariness and now interprets it as pain. It no longer seems remarkable to him that she should ask such a question, or unthinkable that he should answer it with the sort of ruthless honesty he has only ever offered to Dumbledore.

"There is a chance that the Dark Lord remains unaware of my treachery. Mulciber is captured and unable to inform against me. Thanks to you, I was not observed fleeing the attack on the castle. The fact that I have not yet been summoned to account for myself reinforces this theory." He hears a strange sound, china rattling in its saucer. He looks down, and realizes that the hand grasping his tea cup is trembling.

He releases it, and folds his hands in his lap. "Our struggle against the enemy is in its final hours. If there is a chance that I can gather further intelligence, then I cannot in good conscience refuse to make the attempt. The nearer we come to the end, the more vital that information will be."

She nods. "You don't want to go back."

How had he ever thought her dull, ordinary? She has a mind like a the sharpest blade, penetrating obfuscation and seizing on the truths he is accustomed to burying beneath the vague, elegant language of his training. "No. I do not want to go back."

He stares at the swirl of knot and watermark in the plain wood of the kitchen table, and remembers the scarred, pitted surface of the work table in his Potions laboratory at Hogwarts. He thinks of Dumbledore, and then of Neville Longbottom, of promises and deceptions.

He is lost in thought until he becomes aware of some new warmth, a gentle pressure against his fingers. He looks from the table to the hands in his lap, and sees that there are three of them, one small and white.

A tiny, thwarted corner of his mind demands that he shake her off. He thinks of Aurelia, convinced for a moment that he can hear her sobs drifting in from the parlor. But he does not pull away.

He remembers, suddenly, the vial of blue potion hidden in the darkness of his robes. Guilt twists in his stomach, but it is not enough to impel him to action. He has lived with guilt long enough that it is no great matter to stow it now in the dark place he has prepared for it.

There are doors that have opened too rarely in the dark house of his mind. This near the end, he does not have the strength to deny himself a window.


	11. Interlude II: The Cruel Tutelage of Alas...

He has been here for years.

His body, deprived of a regular sleep cycle, no longer knows the difference between night and day. When he closes his eyes—it is so rarely safe to do so—he drops immediately into deepest, dreamless sleep.

The first month of his training, Moody cursed him in his sleep every single night— i Tarantallegra /i , bringing him to his feet before his eyes were open, i Avis /i , covering his body in stings and welts from head to foot. A moment of frantic struggle, then the point of Moody's wand at the base of his throat. "You're dead, boy," the soft growl in his ear reminding him of where he is, what failures have brought him to this point.

Eventually he came to register the muffled thump of Moody's wooden leg in time to wake and gather himself, but it didn't help. The first time he managed to disarm Moody in the dark he had taken a moment to gloat before raising a light, and in that moment he felt the unfamiliar sting of a cold length of steel against his throat.

Moody hissed—"You think that makes you safe? You're trapped under blankets in a dark room with an enemy you can't see, and you think you're safe? You're an idiot, Potter. And you're dead. Again."

After the first month, Moody stops coming every night. He comes every other night, then at random. This only makes it harder to sleep.

But Harry knows it is no more than he deserves.

He hates Moody.

He had been happy, even excited when Dumbledore explained where he was going, and who was going to train him. He thought he knew Moody. He thought Moody was his friend, a late addition to his collection of father figures. He'd thought going away with Moody would be a retreat, a chance to be safe and recover from the chaos that had entered his soul after the siege at Hogsmeade. A week after he arrived, he remembered Dumbledore's words at the end of his fourth year. "You have never known the real Alastor Moody," he had said. Now Harry knows he was right.

Moody won't let him heal his wounds with magic. "You're going to get used to the idea of consequences, before you get another chance to inflict them on someone else," he said after ambushing Harry and covering him with lacerations from head to foot.

"I trusted you," Harry had said around clenched teeth, glaring up at him through a curtain of bloody hair.

"If you did," Moody had replied, "you wouldn't have let me hit you."

He sees Ron and Ginny once a week. When they arrived nine days ago, Harry had fallen into their arms and sobbed, past the point of remembering a time when this would have embarrassed him. Their wide, worried eyes were the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen.

He hears them arguing later. Ron wants to take him away, make Dumbledore put someone else in charge of his training. Ginny doesn't agree, although it is clear that she wants to. She cries quietly while Ron rants, then shakes her head. "He needs this," is all she will say.

Harry is grateful to Ron. But he knows that Ginny is right. Every day he is here, he is dying a little more, and that is just as it should be. The Harry that kills Voldemort cannot be the same person who led ten people into a doomed fight at the Department of Mysteries. The Harry who wins the war cannot be the arrogant child who got a third of Hogwarts killed by bringing the siege of Hogsmeade down on their heads.

When Ron and Ginny are allowed to see him, he doesn't waste time talking. They tell him of their family, and of Hermione, and he sits and smiles and basks in their presence. When Moody comes to drive them off, he blinks away tears.

At the end of Ron and Ginny's first two visits, Moody simply comes to the door and waits while they say goodbye. At the end of the third visit, he turns the corner rapidly, and, before anyone knows what is happening, he has cursed Ginny, who falls, frozen, from her chair to the floor.

Harry dives and rolls to shield her with his body, as a second curse hits Ron, who has not moved except to stand up and stare at Moody, sputtering in outrage. Only then does Harry manage to fire a hex off at Moody, disarming him.

He lies, panting, on the floor next to Ginny, and stares incredulously up at the monstrous face looming over them.

"Now it's them that's dead, Potter," he says, jerking his head down at Ginny. "When are you going to learn?"

He summons his wand from Harry's slack hand, and walks off.

Harry breaks the curses on his friends, shaking.

He is changing

"The first rule of fighting," says Moody, as they stand facing each other, four yards apart, "is this: win."

Harry chokes down the half dozen impudent responses that come to mind. Seven years of classes with Snape have trained him well in this regard.

"The second rule of fighting," Moody continues, "is to understand what winning means."

Harry has several smart replies to that statement also, but after the words have sunk in for a moment he is intrigued, to the point where curiosity grows stronger than the reflexive desire to scoff. "What are you talking about?"

"Think back five years ago, to the night you saw Voldemort return."

"In the graveyard?"

"Exactly. You fought him that night. You beat him. How?"

Harry has asked himself this question too many times, and answered it too unsuccessfully, to be glib, but he has no answer—or at least, no answers that are likely to satisfy Moody. "I don't know. I surprised him, I guess...."

"Wrong." Harry flushes, and shuts his mouth. Moody begins to circle him, and Harry has to keep moving in order to maintain eye contact. "Wasn't anything you did. You were marked for death that night. Ever since that night, you've been a walking dead man. And death is jealous, boy. She'll keep coming for you until she gets her due."

Heat fills and constricts his throat. His nostrils flare, and by clenching his fist at his side he is able to keep most of the irritation from his voice. "Right. So basically I'm wasting my time, then."

He sees Moody's wand hand twitch toward the sheathe in his left sleeve, and without thinking he jumps to the left, rolls, and comes up with his wand. Moody's wand flies from his fingertips, and Harry catches it.

Moody grins, and extends his hand wordlessly. His wand comes sailing back toward him. "I said she'd keep coming for you. But you're a lucky bastard. And the more you know, the luckier you'll get. No one outruns death forever. But that's not the point."

Harry gets to his feet, not bothering to dust the grass and dirt from his elbows.

"You beat Voldemort that night because he let you. Because he had you cornered and he wanted to wank over it. You didn't care about scaring him, making him feel anything. You wanted to live. And you did."

Moody's voice becomes graver and Harry stares at him, unable to move or speak, as though he were a child enraptured by an old, evil fairy tale. "But he learned his lesson. The next time you saw him he was ready to kill you straight away, and it took Dumbledore to get you out of that one. But Voldemort won't have forgotten, and the next time you face him, he'll be even faster."

"So, what? He wants to kill me." Harry is impatient to hear the point of Moody's lecture, certain that it has to end on a better note than it began. "I get that."

"The i so what /i is, take a leaf from his book. When the enemy is before you, it's not winning to have him on his knees. It's not winning if he's pissed himself with fear. If you're proud, if you're glad, if you're angry, then you're wasting time. You identify the enemy. You kill him. You move on."

Harry sinks down on one of the sitting stones nearby, because he is tired, and because he wants to think, but also because the next time Moody curses him he can roll behind the rocks for cover. This is the way he has learned to think. "They say you're the best Auror that ever was. But Sirius told me that during the first war you never killed unless you had to. "

"I'm not you, Potter." Moody's magical eye is still for once, trained straight on him. "I was a soldier. You're a weapon. I won't tell you lies—it's a fine line, not becoming the thing you're fighting. But if you don't win, it won't matter what you are. Not for you, not for any of us."

For all the times he's said as much to himself, and for all the time the sentiment has hung, unspoken, in the air between himself and other members of the Order, this is the first time anyone has said it out loud.

"It might even be better," he says slowly, not looking at Moody, "if I do cross that line."

He looks up. Moody is watching him.

He goes on. "Maybe the whole point of this prophecy....destiny....thing is that I'm not really special at all. I'm just, you know. A sacrifice."

His voice is shaking but he ignores it. "Maybe the universe has a price for getting rid of Voldemort. Maybe it's me. Not just my life, cause that would be too easy. My....soul....for our safety. That's the trade off."

Moody gazes at him, and for a second it seems that he has to struggle not to flinch."I don't have an answer to that Potter. Do you want my opinion?"

"Sure."

"I think that whatever you become, it's not the end. You can keep becoming. You won't ever be the same again. But you won't need to be."

Harry smiles. "You really believe that?"

"I need you to believe it."

When Moody turns and walks away Harry keeps his seat, sure that he's being set up for another ambush. But Moody doesn't come back for the rest of the day.

That is when it occurs to Harry that he is becoming something now that even Moody doesn't recognize.

That is when he begins to hope.

Things begin to happen quickly after that.

He is out with Ron and Ginny, preparing to paddle a canoe out onto the lake, despite the fact that none of them have ever been in a boat before. Ginny falls in as they are pushing off the dock, and Ron immediately doubles over laughing. Harry cracks a grin, but is too busy admiring the cling of Ginny's wet clothing to join in.

When the crack of Apparition comes from behind them, Harry pushes Ron to the ground and whirls, wand in hand. Moody is standing on the bank a few feet off. Harry stands and waits, but Moody does not advance, or attack.

"Follow me," Moody calls. "Pomfrey's hut." He disappears.

Harry looks at Ginny, and at Ron, who is no longer laughing. Then he too Disapparates.

Moody is waiting by the door of the small brown house where Lupin hides during his transformations, and where Neville goes to recover from his fits. Moody opens the door without speaking, and looks back at Harry, who is confused, and still wary of ambush.

"Dumbledore," is all Moody says. Harry's heart leaps, and he smiles, feeling uncomplicated emotion for the first time since coming here. He walks past Moody into the hut, and stops just after crossing the threshold.

The hut is dark, lit by a single candle. Through the shadows he can just make out Dumbledore, lying on a bed in the corner of the room.

"Professor?" Harry walks slowly toward the side of the bed, and when Dumbledore opens his eyes he has to force himself not to jump. It is startling to see those eyes, bright and alert, in the still, wasted body.

"Harry," Dumbledore breathes. "How are you?"

"All right, I guess." He stops, as suspicions begun to race like needles under his skin. "Are you ill, sir? No one told me."

"There was no time." Dumbledore's voice sounds very far away, and Harry cannot see his face. A voice at the back of his brain asks why the Headmaster isn't sitting up, why he doesn't even turn his face in Harry's direction, but he does not let himself consider the question for long. "Have a seat, please."

Harry glances around and sees a chair at the side of Dumbledore's bed. He has to force his legs to carry him there with a conscious effort.

Even after he has taken his seat mere inches away from Dumbledore, he can neither hear him breathing, nor perceive the rise and fall of his chest. When Dumbledore speaks again, Harry exhales heavily, and only then does he realize that he has been holding his own breath.

"There is something I must show you, Harry." His lips barely move at all when he speaks. "Something I must give you."

His wand appears suddenly in hand, and before Harry can ask, or even wonder, what is happening, Dumbledore has whispered, "Forgive me."

And then all questions are forgotten.

An hour later Harry stumbles from the hut and straight into the arms of a waiting Moody, who catches him by the shoulders and forces him to take a step back. He is looking into Harry's face, but Harry cannot see him. Everything before his eyes is white.

"Harry?"

"He's dead."

"What did he say to you?" His vision begins to clear and he can see Moody's magical eye, looking straight through him. There is a hunger in his voice, in his face, that makes Harry tear away from his grip.

Moody looks at him for a long moment, then shakes his head. "No. Never mind." He sighs heavily. "Never mind." He lifts his chin. "You all right?"

"No."

Harry turns and looks around for a place to sit. There is nothing close, so he lets himself fall to the grass, and sits with his elbows on his knees. There is an ant crawling on a blade of grass between his feet, and he focuses there, suddenly entranced by the complexity and miracle of it.

The images crowding his mind do not belong to him. They are blurred, as though in motion, and he cannot concentrate on any one of them for except for a second, just long enough to gain an impression of their quality. The emotions they provoke are also blurred, confused, as though every picture belonged to the memories of a dozen different people.

His head feels strange. Not painful, not even violated, but....open. His mind is full of pictures but they are weightless. Behind them all is a light that blinds without burning.

He hardly knows what has happened. What Dumbledore has done to him. Given to him. But there is an impulsion behind the uncertainty that causes him to speak before he knows what he is saying.

"Am I ready?"

"What?"

"Am I ready. Are we done training. Are you close to cutting me loose. You know." He keeps his gaze fixed on the grass.

"For what you have to do, Potter, I don't think you can be ready." Moody's voice, at first anxious, bewildered, is calm and sure now. Harry can feel Moody's eyes bearing down on the top of his head. "But if I had to make a call, I'd say this: I'd trust you. With my life. With the lives of others."

Harry nods, and feels the last pieces merging. Shifting into place. "I need something." He gets to his feet and looks at Moody. "I need Wormtail. Bring him here."

He half expects Moody to laugh at him. He is half appalled at himself, and a voice like Snape's hisses in his mind, calls him names—presumptuous, and arrogant. He has denied these imprecations for nine years, and, secretly, he has always felt they were probably true, at least in part.

But Moody does not laugh. He stares at him for a long moment, then nods, slowly, and in that moment Harry realizes that the changes at work in him these many months are now complete. That if Moody will not question Harry in this, then he has become something entirely other: no longer a child, no longer a liability, but a figure of prophecy, destined by birth and the belief of wizards greater than he.

Without another word, Moody Disapparates. Harry stands where he is, and starts to shiver.

Moody comes to him as he sleeps that night. Harry wakes as the wooden leg stumps rhythmically down the hall and has his wand at Moody's throat as soon as the door is open.

Moody looks down on him and doesn't blink. "Come with me."

Harry nods immediately, understanding, and sheathes his wand, closing his door behind him. Moody turns, and together they walk down the corridor and into the darkness. There is a hidden trapdoor in the kitchen, which leads into the cellar. They lower themselves through it, dropping six feet to the packed earth floor below.

Moody points to something in the darkness that Harry does not see at first. Then his eyes adjust, and he begins to discern the shape of a heavy wooden door, sealed with bands of iron.

"He's in there. Pyralis Proctor and Razi Sinistra are guarding him." Moody gives him a small smile, crooked and grim, as all Moody's smiles are. "When you're done with him, give your instructions to Razi and Proctor. They'll do whatever you say."

Harry cannot help but smile back. "Anything?" Days ago, he would have been dizzy, bewildered by the authority. Now he is merely satisfied.

"That's what I said." Moody taps the door with his wand, and it opens silently into the dimly lit room beyond.

Harry is cold, and the entire scenario bears the taint of unreality. But he turns to Moody, and nods. "This won't take long," he says, then steps inside. The door swings shut behind him.

He has not seen Peter Pettigrew since the night Cedric died. The intervening five years have not been kind to either of them, but the signs of waste are palpable in the older man. He has lost the few tufts of colorless hair he used to have, and his cheekbones are sharp above the hollows of his face. His hands, gripping the arms of his chair with white knuckles, are small and childlike.

Harry has clear memories of those hands. He had watched Voldemort create one of them. One of them had created the thin, crescent shaped scar on the inside of Harry's arm. It is not a magical scar, but in that moment he can feel the heat and point of the knife, twisting in his flesh again.

He has carried a knife since the night Moody held one to his throat. The weight of it is secure, strapped against his ankle. He glances from Peter to the two Aurors standing silent in the corners of the room, at Sinistra's dark eyes and olive skin, Proctor's fleshy, bank clerk's face. He finds their absolute lack of expression a comfort.

Pettigrew's head hangs down, his chin pointed at his breast. He does not look up until Harry pulls his knife from the sheathe at his ankle. There is barely time for Pettigrew's eyes to grow wide before Harry has stepped up close to him, sliced the bonds from the wrist of his right hand, and twisted his arm so that the sleeve falls back.

"Hello," Harry says, and with all the strength in his wrist presses the blade into the loose, pale flesh of Pettigrew's forearm.

His screams are wild, born, Harry thinks, more of fear than pain. He has suffered far worse injuries in silence. Both of them have.

Harry holds the bloody edge of the knife up to Pettigrew's throat, and instantly the screams dim to a whimper.

"I'm not going to kill you unless I have to, Wormtail," he says, his voice calmer than it should be. "Not tonight, anyway. This?" He reaches down and grips the no longer plump wrist. "Was just a reminder. You owe me blood."

"Please." The room is cold but there is sweat on his face. "I never meant to hurt you, Harry. I never meant to hurt anyone."

Harry releases him, and takes a step back. Pity, revulsion, hatred—he cannot conjure any of the emotions he is used to feeling for his parents' betrayer. He is content to have Pettigrew here, in his power. He is pleased to make use of him. That is all.

Almost all. There is emptiness too, in the place of what had been consuming passion. He is freer now. Older.

"I have a message for Voldemort." Harry fixes the small, watering eyes in his gaze. "You're going to give it to him."

From the pocket of his robes, Harry produces a small bowl, about the size of a coffee cup. He taps it with his wand, and it grows into a full sized Pensieve, spinning on the surface of the table like a flipped coin landing on its side.

He draws the memory of his final conversation with Dumbledore from his mind and places it in the Pensieve. His shoulders lighten, as though relieved of a physical burden.

"Have a look," he says, and taking the bowl in one hand, forces Pettigrew's face down into the swirling mess with the other.

While the memory is in the Pensieve, Harry cannot recall it for himself. But he retains the intellectual knowledge of what Pettigrew is seeing. Knows why the rat like face is growing pale and the thin mouth hanging open.

Pettigrew's head jerks up, at last, and he stares at Harry, as though he has never seen him before.

Harry grins. Possibly the first genuine smile to have graced his lips in months.

"Tell him what you saw. Tell him....that I have eaten death. And that I'm coming for him."

Pettigrew's hands grow slack and the Pensieve begins to slip from his fingers. Harry grabs it, and shrinks it again. He places it in his pocket, and with one last look at Pettigrew, turns to the Aurors in the corner.

"Take him back where you found him," he says, and leaves.

Moody is waiting for him outside the door.

Harry stands facing him, hands in his pockets, until Moody nods in the direction of the room. "You played that nicely."

Harry does not bother asking, or even wondering, how Moody knew what transpired so far out of his ear shot. Fred and George Weasley have an exclusive contract with the Order for Extendable Ears. "Do you think it'll work?"

"He won't run straight back to Voldemort. He's no fool. But if we can find him, Voldemort can too. And that'll be enough."

Harry nods. Rolls pebbles under the sole of his boot and shifts his weight from side to side, though he knows it makes him look like a child.

"For whatever it's worth, Potter," Moody adds after a moment, "I'm proud of you. Dumbledore was too, though I don't doubt he told you so."

Harry laughs sharply, unable to control himself. In the last weeks he has come to possess an overdeveloped sense of irony, and though through the numbness he knows that Moody's words are important to him, he is preoccupied with the brand new sensation of having drawn blood from another human being, and having enjoyed it.

Moody's wild eyebrows, hunched low over his eyes, hint that he has guessed some part of what Harry is thinking. He continues, "Whatever happens now, you're doing what you can. And that's what matters."

The laugh quiets to a smile as Harry recalls three months' worth of insinuation that he is incapable of appreciating consequence. "To who?"

"To me," Moody says, as though he means it. Then with a sharp crack, he is gone.

Harry continues to stand in the darkness. A few moments later he finds he is breathing quickly and heavily, and makes a conscious effort to slow his pulse.

His best is not enough. Not for him. But then, Moody knows that. He is counting on it.

Harry Apparates to the kitchen above the cellar, and heads for the corridor where everyone who isn't training to kill Voldemort sleeps. The window at the end of the hall is open, curtains fluttering, in a warm breeze. The floor and walls glow silver in the moonlight. He can hear faint moans from behind the door at the end of the corridor, Neville, caught in the grip of his nightmares. There is no respite for any of them, sleeping or waking.

He stands at Ron's door, knowing that, in the next room, Ginny will hear his knock and come to join them. It is hours yet until dawn, but he knows they will not mind his waking them. They will not blame him for anything he does. If he spreads his hands to show them Pettigrew's blood, black against his fingers, they will wash the stain away with their handkerchiefs and tell him that he never meant to hurt anyone. They do not understand how rapidly he is growing beyond the reach of their sympathies. They do not understand that in order to save them he will have to betray them, set aside the Harry who is their friend and become someone else entirely.

i "Love, you know already," /i Dumbledore had whispered, his voice stronger than before. i "But Death is not given to any of us to understand, save at the end. Voldemort believes he has conquered it, but he is a fool. Death is not for conquering." /i 

Harry takes a step back from Ron's door, then turns and walks toward the window. The moonlight makes him think of death, and of Dumbledore, his spectacles and brilliant white beard. He thinks of the night Sirius died, the battle with Voldemort before the Fountain of Magical Brethren. Voldemort had possessed him, then released him, because he could not bear to inhabit a soul capable of love. With the grief of Sirius' death still so near, it had been natural to give himself over to those feelings. The most natural thing in the world, to be himself at his rawest, saddest moment.

i "I am dying, Harry." /i He knows how weak Dumbledore's voice was toward the end, but in Harry's memory he sounds as he did the day they first met, strong, wise, comforting. i "There is one final gift I can try to give you, but you must not underestimate the price of accepting it. Once you have touched death, you will be marked forever. It will change you in ways I cannot foresee." /i 

Now, he has no idea how to be himself.

He turns back down the hall and walks toward Ron's room and raises his hand, knocks on the door. Loudly, because this is the last thing he will ask of them.

A moment later there are footsteps, and the door opens to reveal Ron's pale, sleep-befuddled face, his hair sticking up over his ears. "Harry?" He blinks once, then rubs the back of his hand over his eyes. "Something wrong?"

"Hi, Ron. No, nothing's wrong." He stands there, asking nothing, only waiting.

"Oh. Okay. Um, come in." Ron takes a step back and opens the door a little wider.

Harry steps through the door and sits on the edge of Ron's bed. Ron sits farther up from him, clutching a pillow. Harry waits for a moment, then says, "Heard about Dumbledore?"

"Yeah. Yeah, Moody came and told us." Ron is still, and against the looming oak backboard he seems smaller than usual.

"I'm....I'm going to have to go away soon," Harry says, and the hand resting on his knee becomes a fist.

"Oh, Harry." He looks to the left and sees Ginny standing at the door adjoining her room and Ron's, cinching her robe at the neck, her eyes wide.

"I'm sorry." Harry looks away.

Ginny crosses to the bed and sits down between the two of them. Reaches toward him and covers his hand with hers.

"'S all right,"Ron says, though his eyes are dark and worried as his sister's.

Harry nods, and lets himself relax in their concern. This is all he wanted, one last tableau to carry with him into the darkness.

This near the end, they are the last indulgence he will allow himself.


End file.
